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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York. 



i 



TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 



HENRY JAMES, Jr. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 






TH£ Library of 

CONGRESS, 


Two Copies Received 

JAN 30 1903 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS OLy XXo. No. 


COPY 


.^ 1 



Copyright, 1875, 
By JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. 

Copyright, 1903, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO, 

All rights reserved. 



CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS. 



- CONTENTS. 

— I — 

^ Page 

Chester 7 

Lichfield and Warwick 20 

North Devon 33 

Wells and Salisbury 44 

Swiss Notes 56 

From Chambert to Milan 71 

From Venice to Strasburg 85 

'The Parisian Stage 98 

A Eqman Holiday 110 

Roman Rides 136 

Roman Neighborhoods 156 

The After-Season in Rome 180 

From a Roman Note-Book 189 

A Chain op Cities 212 

The St. Gothard . . . . . . . .230 



vi CONTENTS. 

Siena 254 

The Autumn in Florence . 269 

Florentine Notes 279 

Tuscan Cities 315 

Havenna 327 

The Splugen . . . 339 

HoMBURG Keformed 354 

Darmstadt 367 

In Holland . 380 

In Belgium 391 



Transatlantic Sketches. 



CHESTER. 



Chester, May, 1872. 

IF the Atlantic voyage is coTinted, as it certainly 
may be, even with the ocean in a fairly good 
humor, an emphatic zero in the sum of one's better ex- 
perience, the American traveller arriving at this vener- 
able town finds himself transposed, without a sensible 
gradation, from the edge of the New "World to the very 
heart of the Old. It is almost a misfortune, perhaps, 
that Chester lies so close to the threshold of England ; 
for it is so rare and complete a specimen of an antique 
town, that the later-coming wonders of its sisters in 
renown — of Shrewsbury, Coventry, and York — suffer 
a trifle by comparison, and the tourist's appetite for 
the picturesque just loses its finer edge. Yet the first 
impressions of an observant American in England — 
of our old friend the sentimental tourist — stir up 
within him such a cloud of sensibility that while the 
charm is still unbroken, he may perhaps as well dis- 
pose, mentally, of the greater as of the less. I have 
been playing at first impressions for the second time, 
and have won the game against a cynical adversary. 
I have been strolling and restrolling along the ancient 



8 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

wall — so perfect in its antiquity — which locks this 
dense little city in its stony circle, with a certain friend 
who has been treating me to a bitter lament on the 
decay of his relish for the picturesque. " I have turned 
the corner of youth/' is his ceaseless plaint ; " I sus- 
pected it, but now I know it, — now that my heart 
beats but once where it beat a dozen times before, and 
that where I found sermons in stones and pictures in 
meadows, delicious revelations and intimations ineffa- 
ble, I find nothing but the stern, dark prose of British 
civilization." But little by little I have grown used to 
my friend's sad monody, and indeed feel half indebted 
to it as a warning against cheap infatuations. 

I defied him, at any rate, to spoil the walls of Chester 
for me. There could be no better example of that 
phenomenon so delightfully frequent in England, — an 
ancient monument or institution, lovingly readopted 
and consecrated to some modern amenity. The good 
Cestrians may boast of their walls, without a shadow 
of that mental reservation on grounds of modern ease, 
which is so often the tax paid by the picturesque ; and 
I can easily imagine, that though most modern towns 
contrive to get on comfortably without this stony gir- 
dle, these people should have come to regard theirs as 
a prime necessity. Eor through it, surely, they may 
know their city more intimately than their uncinctured 
neighbors, — survey it, feel it, rejoice in it as many 
times a day as they please. The civic consciousness, 
sunning itself thus on the city's rim, and glancing at 
the little, swarming, towered, and gabled town within, 
and then at the blue undulations of the near Welsh 



CHESTEE. - 9 

border, may easily deepen to delicious complacency. 
The wall encloses tlie town in a continuons ring, which, 
passing through innumerable picturesque vicissitudes, 
often threatens to snap, but never fairly breaks the 
link ; so that starting at any point, an hour's easy stroll 
will bring you back to your station. I have quite lost 
my heart to this charming wall, and there are so many 
things to be said about it that I hardly know where to 
begin. The great fact, I suppose, is that it contains a 
Eoman substructure, and rests for much of its course 
on foundations laid by that race of master-builders. 
But in spite of this sturdy origin, much of which is 
buried in the well-trodden soil of the ages, it is the 
gentlest and least offensive of ramparts, and completes 
its long irregular curve without a frown or menace in 
all its disembattled stretch. The earthy deposit of 
time has, indeed, in some places climbed so high about 
its base, that it amounts to no more than a terrace of 
modest proportions. It has everywhere, however, a 
rugged outer parapet and a broad hollow flagging, wide 
enough for two strollers abreast. Thus equipped, it 
wanders through its adventurous circuit ; now sloping, 
now bending, now broadening into a terrace, now nar- 
rowing into an alley, now swelling into an arch, now 
dipping into steps, now passing some thorn-screened 
garden, and now reminding you that it was once a 
more serious matter tlian all this, by the occurrence of 
a rugged, ivy-smothered tower. Its present mild inno- 
cence is increased, to your mind, by the facility with 
which you can approach it from any point in the town. 
Every few steps as you go you see some little court or 
1* 



10 TEANS ATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

alley boring toward it tlirongh the close-pressed houses. 
It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the 
accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American eyes, ac- 
customed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, 
is the striking feature of European street scenery. An 
American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect 
feast of crookedness, — of those random corners, projec- 
tions, and recesses, odd domestic interspaces charm- 
ingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural 
surprises and caprices and fantasies which offer such a 
delicious holiday to a vision nourished upon brown-stone 
fronts. An American is born to the idea that on his 
walks abroad it is perpetual level wall ahead of him, and 
such a revelation as he finds here of infinite accident 
and infinite efi'ect gives a wholly novel zest to the use of 
his eyes. It produces, too, the reflection — a superfi- 
cial and fallacious one, perhaps — that amid all this 
cunning chiaroscuro of its mise en scene, life must have 
more of a certain homely entertainment. It is at least 
no fallacy to say that childhood — or the later memory 
of childhood — must borrow from such a background 
a kind of anecdotical wealth. We all know how in 
the retrospect of later moods the incidents of early 
youth " compose," visibly, each as an individual picture, 
with a magic for which the greatest painters have no 
corresponding art. There is a vivid reflection of this 
magic in some of the early pages of Dickens's '' Cop- 
perfield" and of George Eliot's ^^Mill on the Floss," 
the writers having had the happiness of growing up 
among old, old things. Two or three of the phases of 
this rambling wall belong especially to the class of 



CHESTER. , 11 

tilings fondly remembered. In one place it skirts the 
edge of the cathedral graveyard, and sweeps beneath 
the great square tower and behind the sacred east win- 
dow of the choir. Of the cathedral there is more to 
say ; but just the spot I speak of is the best stand- 
point for feeling how fine an influence in the archi- 
tectural line — where theoretically, at least, influences 
are great — is the massive tower of an English abbey, 
dominating the homes of men; and for watching the 
eddying flight of swallows make vaster still to the eye 
the large calm fields of stonework. At another point, 
two battered and crumbling towers, decaying in their 
winding-sheets of ivy, make a prodigiously picturesque 
diversion. One inserted in the body of the wall and 
the other connected with it by a short, crumbling ridge 
of masonry, they contribute to a positive jumble of 
local color. A shaded mall wanders at the foot of the 
rampart ; beside this passes a narrow canal, with locks 
and barges and burly watermen in smocks and breeches ; 
while the venerable pair of towers, with their old red 
sandstone sides peeping through the gaps in their green 
mantles, rest on the soft grass of one of those odd frag- 
ments of public garden, a crooked strip of ground 
turned to social account, which one meets at every 
turn, apparently, in England, — a tribute to the needs 
of the "masses." Stat magni nominis umbra. The 
quotation is doubly pertinent here, for this little gar- 
den-strip is adorned with mossy fragments of Eoman 
stonework, bits of pavement, altars, and baths, disin- 
terred in the local soil. England is the land of small 
economies, and the present rarely fails to find good use 



12 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

for the odds and ends of the past. These two hoary 
shells of masonry are therefore converted into " muse- 
ums/' receptacles for the dustiest and shabbiest of taw- 
dry back-parlor curiosities. Here preside a couple of 
those grotesque creatures, a la Dickens, whom one 
finds squeezed into every cranny of English civiliza- 
tion, scraping a thin subsistence, like mites in a mouldy 
cheese. 

Next after its wall — possibly even before it — Ches- 
ter values its Eows, — an architectural idiosyncrasy 
which must be seen to be appreciated. They are a sort 
of Gothic edition of the blessed arcades of Italy, and 
consist, roughly speaking, of a running public passage, 
tunnelled through the second story of the houses. The 
low basement is thus directly on the drive-way, to 
which a flight of steps descends, at frequent intervals, 
from this superincumbent veranda. The upper portion 
of the houses projects to the outer line of the arcade, 
where they are propped with pillars and posts and par- 
apets. The shop-fronts face along the arcade, and admit 
you to little caverns of traffic, more or less dusky ac- 
cording to their opportunities for illumination in the 
rear. If the picturesque is measured by its hostility to 
our modern notions of convenience, Chester is probably 
the most picturesque city in the world. This arrange- 
ment is endlessly rich in opportunities for effect. But 
the full charm of the architecture of which it is so 
essential a part must be observed from the street below. 
Chester is still an antique city, and mediseval England 
sits bravely under her gables. Every third house is 
a " specimen," — gabled and latticed, timbered and 



CHESTER. ' 13 

carved, and wearing its years more or less lightly. 
These ancient dwellings present every shade and degree 
of historical color and expression. Some are dark with 
neglect and deformity, and the horizontal slit admitting 
light into the lurking Eow seems to collapse on its dis- 
located props like a pair of toothless old jaws. Others 
stand there square-shouldered and sturdy, with their 
beams painted and straightened, their plaster white- 
washed, their carvings polished, and the low casement 
covering the breadth of the frontage adorned with cur- 
tains and flower-pots. It is noticeable that the actual 
townsfolk have bravely accepted the situation be- 
queathed by the past, and the large number of rich 
and intelligent restorations of the old facades speaks 
well both for their tastes and their means. These elab- 
orate and ingenious repairs attest a pious reverence for 
the peculiar stamp of the city. I indeed suspect many 
of these fresh antiques of being better royalists than 
the king, and of having been restored with interest. 
About the genuine antiques there would be properly a 
great deal to say, for they are really a theme for the 
philosopher ; but the theme is too heavy for my pen, 
and I can give them but the passing tribute of a sigh. 
They are fatally picturesque, — horribly eloquent. Fix 
one of them with your gaze, and it seems fairly to reek 
with mortality. Every stain and crevice seems to syl- 
lable some human record, — a record of unillumined 
lives. I have been trying hard to fancy them animated 
by the children of " Merry England,", but I am quite 
unable to think of them save as peopled by the victims 
of dismal old-world pains and fears. Human life, 



14 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

surely, packed away behind those impenetrable lattices 
of lead and bottle-glass, just above which the black 
outer beam marks the suffocating nearness of the ceil- 
ing, can have expanded into but scanty freedom and 
bloomed into little sweetness. 

Nothing has struck me more in my strolls along the 
Eows than the fact that the most zealous observation 
can keep but uneven pace with the fine differences in 
national manners. Some of the most sensible of these 
differences are yet so subtle and indefinable that one 
must give up the attempt to express them, though the 
omission leaves but a rough sketch. As you pass with 
the bustling current from shop to shop, you feel local 
custom and tradition — the foreign tone of things — 
pressing on you from every side.* The tone of things 
is, somehow, heavier than with us ; manners and modes 
are more absolute and positive ; they seem to swarm 
and to thicken the atmosphere about you. Morally 
and physically it is a denser air than ours. "We seem 
loosely hung together at home as compared with the 
English, every man of whom is a tight fit in his place. 
It is not an inferential, but a palpable fact, that Eng- 
land is a crowded country. There is stillness and 
space — grassy, oak-studded space — at Eaton Hall, 
where the Marquis of Westminster dwells (or I believe 
can afford to humor his notion of not dwelling), but 
there is a crowd and a hubbub in Chester. Wherever 
you go, the population has overflowed. You stroll on 
the walls at eventide, and you hardly find elbow-room. 
You haunt the cathedral shades, and a dozen saunter- 
ing mortals temper your solitude. You glance up an 



CHESTER. 15 

alley or side street, and discover populous windows and 
doorsteps. You roll along country roads, and find 
countless humble pedestrians dotting the green way- 
sides. The English landscape is always a " landscape 
with figures." And everywhere you go, you are accom- 
panied by a vague consciousness of the British child 
hovering about your knees and coat-skirts, naked, grimy, 
and portentous. You reflect, with a sort of physical 
relief, on Australia, Canada, and India. Where there 
are many men, of course there are many needs ; which 
helps to justify to the philosophic stranger the vast 
number and the irresistible coquetry of the little shops 
which adorn these low-browed Eows. The shop-fronts 
have always seemed to me the most sesthetic things in 
England ; and I waste more time than I should care to 
confess to in covetous contemplation of those vast, clear 
panes, behind which the nether integuments of gentle- 
men are daintily suspended from glittering brass rods. 
The manners of the dealers in these comfortable wares 
seldom fail to confirm your agreeable impressions. You 
are thanked with effusion for expending twopence, — a 
fact of deep significance to the truly analytic mind, and 
which always seems to me a vague reverberation from 
certain of Miss Edgeworth's novels, perused in child- 
hood. When you think of the small profits, the small 
jealousies, the long waiting, and the narrow margin for 
evil days implied by this redundancy of shops and 
shopmen, you hear afresh the steady rumble of that 
deep key-note of English manners, overscored so often, 
and with such sweet beguilement, by finer harmonies, 
but never extinguished, — the " struggle for existence." 



16 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

The Eows are picturesque and entertaining, and it is 
a pity that, thirty years ago, when they must have been 
more so, there was no English Balzac to introduce them 
into realistic romance, with a psychological commen- 
tary. But the cathedral is better, modestly as it stands 
on the roll of English abbeys. It is of moderate dimen- 
sions, and rather meagre in form and ornament ; but to 
an American it is a genuine cathedral, and awakens all 
the proper emotions. Among these is a certain irresis- 
tible regret that so much of its hoary substance should 
give place to the fine, fresh-colored masonry with 
which Mr. Gilbert Scott — that man of many labors — 
is so intelligently investing it. The red sandstone of 
the primitive structure, darkened and devoured by 
time, survives in many places, in frowning mockery of 
all of this modern repair. The great tower, however, 
— completely restored, — rises high enough to seem to 
belong, as cathedral towers should, to the far-off air 
that vibrates with the chimes and the swallows, and 
to square serenely, east and west and south and north, 
its embossed and fluted sides. English cathedrals, 
within, a.re apt at first to look pale and naked; but 
after a while, if the proportions are fair and the spaces 
largely distributed, when you perceive the light beat- 
ing softly down from the cold clerestory and your eye 
measures caressingly the tallness of columns and the 
hoUowness of arches, and lingers on the old genteel 
inscriptions of mural marbles and brasses ; and, above 
all, when you become conscious of that sweet, cool 
mustiness in the air which seems to haunt these places, 
like the very climate of Episcopacy, you may grow to 



CHESTER, ■ 17 

feel that they are less the empty shells of a departed 
faith than the abodes of a faith which is still a solid 
institution and " establishment." Catholicism has gone, 
but the massive respectability of Anglicanism is a rich 
enough substitute. So at least it seemed to me, a Sun- 
day or two since, as I sat in the choir at Chester, await- 
ing a discourse from Canon Kingsley. The Anglican 
service had never seemed to my profane sense so much 
an affair of magnificent intonations and cadences, — of 
pompous effects of resonance and melody. The vast 
oaken architecture of the stalls among which we nestled, 

— somewhat stiffly, and with a due apprehension of 
wounded ribs and knees, — climbing vainly against the 
dizzier reach of the columns, — the beautiful English 
voices of certain officiating canons, — the little rosy 
" king's scholars " sitting ranged beneath the pulpit, 
in white-winged surplices, which made their heads, 
above the pew-edges, look like rows of sleepy cherubs, 

— every element in the scene gave it a great spec- 
tacular beauty. They suggested, too, what is suggested 
in England at every turn, that conservatism here has 
all the charm, and leaves dissent and democracy and 
other vulgar variations nothing but their bald logic. 
Conservatism has the cathedrals, the colleges, the cas- 
tles, the gardens, the traditions, the associations, the 
fine names, the better manners, the poetry; Dissent 
has the dusky brick chapels in provincial by-streets, 
the names out of Dickens, the uncertain tenure of the 
h, and the poor mens sihi conscia recti. Differences 
which in other countries are slight and varying, almost 
metaphysical, as one may say, are marked in England 



18 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

by a gulf. Nowhere else does the degree of one's 
respectability involve such solid consequences, and I 
am sure I don't wonder that the sacramental word 
which with us (and in such correlatives as they possess, 
more or less among the continental races) is pronounced 
lightly and facetiously, and as a quotation from the 
Philistines, is uttered here with a perfectly grave face. 
To have the courage of one's opinions is in short to 
have a prodigious deal of courage, and I think one 
must need as much to be a Dissenter as one needs 
patience not to be a duke. Perhaps the Dissenters (to 
limit the question to them) manage to stay out of the 
church by thinking exclusively of the sermon. Canon 
Kingsley's discourse was one more example of the 
familiar truth, — not without its significance to minds 
zealous for the good old fashion of " making an effort," 
— that there is a mysterious affinity between large 
accessories and slender essentials. The sermon, be- 
neath that triply consecrated vault, should have been 
of as fine a quality as the church. It was not ; and I 
confess that a tender memory of ancient obligations to 
the author of " Westward Ho ! " and " Hypatia " forbids 
me saying more of it. An American, I think, is not 
incapable of taking a secret satisfaction in an incon- 
gruity of this kind. He finds with relief that mortals 
reared amid all this rich aesthetic privilege are after all 
but mortals. His constant sense of the beautiful scenic 
properties of English life is apt to beget a habit of 
melancholy reference to the dead-blank wall which 
forms the background of our own life-drama ; and from 
doubting in this fantastic humor whether we have even 



CHESTER. 19 

tliat modest value in the picturesque scale that he has 
sometimes fondly hoped, he lapses into a moody scep- 
ticism as to our value in the intellectual, and finds 
himself wondering vaguely whether this is not a 
mio'htier race as well as a lovelier land. This of course 
will never do ; so that when after being escorted down 
the beautiful choir, in what, from the American point 
of view, is an almost gorgeous ecclesiastical march, by 
the Dean in a white robe trimmed with scarlet, and 
black-robed sacristans carrying silver wands, the offi- 
ciating canon mounts into a splendid canopied and 
pinnacled pulpit of Gothic stonework and proves — 
not a Jeremy Taylor in ordinary, our poor sentimental 
tourist begins to hold up his head again, and to reflect 
with complacency that opportunity wasted is not our 
national reproach. I am not sure, indeed, that in the 
excess of his elation he is not tempted to accuse his 
English neighbors of being indifferent, unperceptive, 
uninspired, and to affirm that they do not half discern 
their good fortune, and that it takes a poor disinherited 
Yankee to appreciate the " points " of this admirable 
country. 



LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 

Oxford, June 11, 1872. 

TO write at Oxford of anything but Oxford re- 
quires, on the part of the sentimental tourist, 
no small power of mental abstraction. Yet I have 
it at heart to pay to three or four other scenes re- 
cently visited the debt of an enjoyment hardly less 
profound than my relish for this scholastic paradise. 
Eirst among these is the cathedral city of Lichfield. 
I say the city, because Lichfield had a character of 
its own apart from its great ecclesiastical feature. 
In the centre of its little market-place — dullest and 
sleepiest of provincial market-places — rises a huge 
effigy of Dr. Johnson, the genius loci, who was con- 
structed, humanly, with very nearly as large an ar- 
chitecture as the great abbey. The Doctor's statue, 
which is of some inexpensive composite, painted a 
shiny brown, and of no great merit of design, fills 
out the vacant dulness of tlie little square in much 
the same way as his massive personality occupies — 
with just a margin for Garrick — the record of his 
native town. In one of the volumes of Croker's 
" Boswell " is a steel plate of the old Johnsonian 
birth-house, by the aid of a vague recollection of 



LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 21 



which I detected the dwelling beneath its modern- 
ized frontage. It bears no mural inscription, and, 
save for a hint of antiquity in the receding basement, 
with pillars supporting the floor above, seems in no 
especial harmony with Johnson's time or fame. Lich- 
field in general appeared to me, indeed, to have little 
to say about her great son, beyond the fact that the 
dreary provincial quality of the local atmosphere, in 
which it is so easy to fancy a great intellectual appe- 
tite turning sick with inanition, may help to explain 
the Doctor's subsequent, almost ferocious, fondness for 
London. I walked about the silent streets, trying to 
repeople them with wigs and short-clothes, and, while 
I lingered near the cathedral, endeavored to guess the 
message of its Gothic graces to Johnson's ponderous 
classicism. But I achieved but a colorless picture at 
the best, and the most vivid image in my mind's eye 
w^as that of the London coach facing towards Temple 
Bar, with the young author of " Easselas " scowling 
near-sightedly from the cheapest seat. With him goes 
the interest of Lichfield town. The place is stale, 
without being really antique. It is as if that prodi- 
gious temperament had absorbed and appropriated its 
original vitality. 

If every dull provincial town, however, formed but 
a girdle of quietude to a cathedral as rich as tliat of 
Lichfield, one w^ould thank it for its unimportunate 
vacancy. Lichfield Cathedral is great among churches, 
and bravely performs the prime duty of a cathedral, 
— that of seeming for the time (to minds unsophis- 
ticated by arcliitectural culture) the finest, on the 



.122 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

whole, of all cathedrals. This one is rather oddly 
placed, on the slope of a hill, the particular spot 
having been chosen, I believe, because sanctified by 
the sufferings of certain primitive martyrs ; but it is 
fine to see how its upper portions surmount any crook- 
edness of posture, and its great towers overtake in 
mid-air the conditions of perfect symmetry. 

The close is a singularly pleasant one. A long 
sheet of water expands behind it, and, besides lead- 
ing the eye off into a sweet green landscape, renders 
the inestimable service of reflecting the three spires 
as they rise above the great trees which mask the 
Palace and the Deanery. These august abodes edge 
the northern side of the slope, and behind their 
huge gate-posts and close-wrought gates the atmos- 
phere of the Georgian era seems to abide. Before 
them stretches a row of huge elms, which must have 
been old when Johnson, was young ; and between 
these and the long-buttressed wall of the cathedral, 
you may stroll to and fro among as pleasant a mix- 
ture of influences (I imagine) as any in England. 
You can stand back here, too, from the west front 
farther than in many cases, and examine at your 
ease its lavish decoration. You are, perhaps, a trifle 
too much at your ease ; for you soon discover what 
a more cursory glance might not betray, that the 
immense facade has been covered with stucco and 
paint, that an effigy of Charles II., in wig and plumes 
and trunk-hose, of almost Gothic grotesqueness, sur- 
mounts the middle window ; that the various other 
statues of saints and kings have but recently climbed 



LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 23 

into their niches ; and that the whole expanse, in 
short, is an imposture. All this was done some fifty 
years ago, in the taste of that day as to restoration, 
and yet it but partially mitigates the impressiveness 
of the high fagade, with its brace of spires, and the 
great embossed and image-fretted surface, to which 
the lowness of the portals (the too frequent reproach 
of English abbeys) seems to give a loftier reach. 
Passing beneath one of these low portals, however, I 
found myself gazing down as noble a church vista 
as any I remember. The cathedral is of magnificent 
length, and the screen between nave and choir has 
been removed, so that from stem to stern, as one may 
say, of the great vessel of the church, it is all a 
mighty avenue of multitudinous slender columns, 
terminating in what seems a great screen of ruby 
and sapphire and topaz, — one of the finest east win- 
dows in England. The cathedral is narrow in pro- 
portion to its length ; it is the long-drawn aisle of the 
poet in perfection, and there is something grandly 
elegant in the unity of effect produced by this un- 
obstructed perspective. The charm is increased by a 
singular architectural fantasy. Standing in the centre 
of the doorway, you perceive that the eastern wall 
does not directly face you, and that from the begin- 
ning of the choir the receding aisle deflects slightly 
to the left, in suggestion of the droop of the Sav- 
iour's on the cross. Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Gilbert 
Scott has recently been at work; to excellent pur- 
pose, from what the sacristan related of the barba- 
rous encroachments of the last century. This extraor- 



24 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

dinary period expended an incalculable amount of 
imagination in proving that it had none. Universal 
whitewash was the least of its offences. But this 
has been scraped away, and the solid stonework left 
to speak for itself, the delicate capitals and cornices 
disencrusted and discreetly rechiselled, and the whole 
temple aesthetically rededicated. Its most beautiful 
feature, happily, has needed no repair, for its perfect 
beauty has been its safeguard. The great choir win- 
dow of Lichfield is the noblest glass-work I remem- 
ber to have seen. I have met nowhere colors so 
chaste and grave, and yet so rich and true, or a clus- 
ter of designs so piously decorative, and yet so pic- 
torial. Such a window as this seems to me the most 
sacred ornament of a great church; to be, not like 
vault and screen and altar, the dim contingent prom- 
ise of heaven, but the very assurance and presence 
of it. This Lichfield glass is not the less interesting 
for being visibly of foreign origin. Exceeding so ob- 
viously as it does the range of English genius in this 
line, it indicates at least the heavenly treasure stored 
up in continental churches. It dates from the early 
sixteenth century, and was transferred hither sixty 
years ago from a decayed Belgian abbey. This, how- 
ever, is not all of Lichfield. You have not seen it 
till you have strolled and restroUed along the close 
on every side, and watched the three spires constantly 
change their relation as you move and pause. E'oth- 
ing can well be finer than the combination of the 
two lesser ones soaring equally in front, and the third 
riding tremendously the magnificently sustained line 



LICHFIELD AND WARWICK., 25 

of the roof. At a certain distance against the sky, 
this long ridge seems something infinite, and the 
great spire to sit astride of it like a giant mounted 
on a mastodon. Your sense of the huge mass of the 
building is deepened by the fact that though the 
central steeple is of double the elevation of the 
others, you see it, from some points, borne back in 
a perspective which drops it to half their stature, 
and lifts them into immensity. But it would take 
lon£^ to tell all that one sees and fancies and thinks 
in a lingering walk about so great a church as this. 
To walk in quest of any object that one has more or 
less tenderly dreamed of, to find your way, to steal 
upon it softly, to see at last if it is church or castle, 
the tower-tops peeping above elms or beeches, — to 
push forward with a rush, and emerge, and pause, and 
draw that first long, breath which is the compromise 
between so many sensations, — this is a pleasure left 
to the tourist even after the broad glare of photography 
has dissipated so many of the sweet mysteries of 
travel, — even in a season when he is fatally apt to meet 
a dozen fellow-pilgrims returning from the shrine, each 
gros Jean comme devant, or to overtake a dozen more, 
telegraphing their impressions down the line as they 
arrive. Such a pleasure I lately enjoyed, quite in its 
perfection, in a walk to Haddon Hall, along a meadow- 
path by the Wye, in this interminable English twi- 
light, which I am never Aveary of admiring, watch in 
hand. Haddon Hall lies among Derbyshire hills, in a 
region infested, I was about to write, by Americans. 
But I achieved my own sly pilgrimage in perfect soli- 

2 



26 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

tude ; and as I descried tlie gray walls among the rook- 
hannted elms, I felt, not like a tourist/ but like an 
adventurer. I have certainly had, as a tourist, few 
more charming moments than some — such as any one, 
I suppose, is free to have — that I passed on a little 
ruined gray bridge which spans, with its single narrow 
arch, a trickling stream at the base of the eminence 
from which those walls and trees look down. The twi- 
light deepened, the ragged battlements and the low, 
broad oriels glanced duskily from the foliage, the rooks 
wheeled and clamored in the glowing sky ; and if there 
had been a ghost on the premises, I certainly ought to 
have seen it. In fact, I did see it, as we see ghosts 
nowadays. I felt the incommunicable spirit of the 
scene with almost painful intensity. The old life, the 
old manners, the old figures seemed present again. The 
great coup de theatre of the young woman who shows 
you the Hall — it is rather languidly done on her 
part — is to point out a little dusky door opening from 
a turret to a back terrace, as the aperture through 
which Dorothy Vernon eloped with Lord John Man- 
ners. I was ignorant of this episode, for I was not to 
enter the Hall till the morrow ; and I am still unversed 
in the history of the actors. But as I stood in the 
luminous dusk weaving the romance of the spot, I 
divined a Dorothy Vernon, and felt very much like a 
Lord John. It was, of course, on just such an evening 
that the delicious event came off, and, by listening with 
the proper credulity, I might surely hear on the flags 
of the castle-court 'the ghostly footfall of a daughter 
of the race. The only footfall I can conscientiously 



LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 27 

swear to, however, is the by no means ghostly tread of 
the damsel who led me through the mansion in the 
prosier light of the next morning. Haddon Hall, I 
believe, is one of the places in which it is the fashion 
to be " disappointed " ; a fact explained in a great 
measure by the absence of a formal approach to the 
house, which shows its low, gray front to every trudger 
on the high-road. But the charm of the place is so 
much less that of grandeur than that of melancholy, 
that it is rather deepened than diminished by this atti- 
tude of obvious survival and decay. And for that 
matter, when you have entered the steep little outer 
court through the huge thickness of the low gateway, 
the present seems effectually walled out, and the past 
walled in, — like a dead man in a sepulchre. It is very 
dead, of a fine June morning, the genius of Haddon 
Hall; and the silent courts and chambers, with their 
hues of ashen gray and faded brown, seem as time- 
bleached as the dry bones of any mouldering organism. 
The comparison is odd ; but Haddon Hall reminded me 
perversely of some of the larger houses at Pompeii. 
The private life of the past is revealed in each case 
with very much the same distinctness and on a small 
enough scale not to stagger the imagination. This old 
dwelling, indeed, has so little of the mass and expanse 
of the classic feudal castle that it almost suggests one 
of those miniature models of great buildings which 
lurk in dusty corners of museums. But it is large 
enough to be deliciously complete and to contain an 
infinite store of the poetry of grass-grown courts, looked 
into by long, low oriel casements, and climbed out of 



28 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

by crooked stone stairways, mounting against the walls 
to little high-placed doors. The " tone " of Haddon 
Hall, of all its walls and towers and stonework, is the 
gray of unpolished silver, and the reader who has been 
in England need hardly be reminded of the sweet 
accord — to eye and mind alike — existing between 
all stony surfaces covered with the pale corrosions of 
time and the deep living green of the strong ivy which 
seems to feed on their slow decay. Of this effect and 
of a hundred others, — from those that belong to low- 
browed, stone-paved empty rooms, where countesses 
used to trail their cloth-of-gold over rushes, to those 
one may note where the dark tower stairway emerges 
at last, on a level with the highest beech-tops, against 
the cracked and sun-baked parapet which flaunted the 
castle standard over the castle woods, — of every form 
of sad desuetude and picturesque decay Haddon Hall 
contains some delightful example. Its finest point is 
undoubtedly a certain court from which a stately flight 
of steps ascends to the terrace where that daughter of 
the Vernon s whom I have mentioned proved that it 
was useless to have baptized her so primly. These 
steps, with the terrace, its balustrade topped with great 
ivy-muffled knobs of stone, and its vast background 
of lordly beeches, form the ideal mise en scene for por- 
tions of Shakespeare's comedies. " It 's Elizabethan," 
said my companion. Here the Countess Olivia may 
have listened to the fantastic Malvolio, or Beatrix, su- 
perbest of flirts, have come to summon Benedick to 
dinner. 

The glories of Chatsworth, which lies but a few 



LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 29 

miles from Haddon, serve as a fine repoussoir to its 
more delicate merits, just as tliey are supposed to gain, 
I believe, in the tourist's eyes, by contrast with its 
charming, its almost Italian shabbiness. But the glo- 
ries of Chatsworth, incontestable as they are, were so 
effectually eclipsed to my mind, a couple of days later, 
that in future, when I think of an English mansion, I 
shall think only of Warwick, and when I think of an 
English park, only of Blenheim. Your run by train 
through the gentle Warwickshire landscape does much 
to prepare you for the great spectacle of the castle, 
which seems hardly more than a sort of massive sym- 
bol and synthesis of the broad prosperity and peace 
and leisure diffused over this great pastoral expanse. 
The Warwickshire meadows are to common English 
scenery what this is to that of the rest of the world. 
For mile upon mile you can see nothing but broad 
sloping pastures of velvet turf, overbrowsed by sheep 
of the most fantastic shagginess, and garnished with 
hedges out of the trailing luxury of whose verdure 
great ivy-tangled oaks and elms arise with a kind of 
architectural regularity. The landscape, indeed, sins 
by excess of nutritive suggestion ; it savors of larder 
and manger; it is too ovine, too bovine, it is almost 
asinine ; and if you were to believe what you see before 
you, this rugged globe would be a sort of boneless ball, 
neatly covered with some such plush-like integument 
as might be figured by the down on the cheek of a 
peach. But a great thought keeps you company as 
you go and gives character to the scenery. Warwick- 
shire was Shakespeare's country. Those who think 



30 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

that a great genius is sometMng supremely ripe and 
healthy and human may find comfort in the fact. It 
helps greatly to enliven my own vague conception of 
Shakespeare's temperament, with which I find it no 
great shock to be obliged to associate ideas of mutton 
and beef. There is something as final, as disillusioned 
of the romantic horrors of rock and forest, as deeply 
attuned to human needs, in the Warwickshire pastures, 
as there is in the underlying morality of the poet. 

With human needs in general Warwick Castle may 
be in no great accord, but few places are more gratify- 
ing to the sentimental tourist. It is the only great 
residence that I ever coveted as a home. The fire that 
we heard so much of last winter in America appears to 
have consumed but an inconsiderable and easily spared 
portion of the house, and the great towers rise over 
the great trees and the town with the same grand air 
as before. Picturesquely, Warwick gains from not be- 
ing sequestered, after the common fashion, in acres of 
park. The village street winds about the garden walls, 
though its hum expires before it has had time to scale 
them. There can be no better example of the way in 
which stone- walls, if they do not of necessity make a 
prison, may on occasions make a palace, than the tre- 
mendous privacy maintained thus about a mansion 
whose windows and towers form the main feature of a 
bustling town. At Warwick -the past join hands so 
stoutly with the present that you can hardly say where 
one begins and the other ends, and you rather miss the 
various crannies and gaps of what I just now called 
the Italian shabbiness of Haddon. There is a Caesar's 



LICHFIELD AND WARWICK. 31 

tower and a Guy's tower and half a dozen more, but 
tliey are so well-conditioned in their ponderous antiq- 
uity that you are at loss whether to consider them 
parts of an old house revived or of a new house pic- 
turesquely superannuated. Such as they are, however, 
plunging into the grassed and gravelled courts from 
which their battlements look really feudal, and into 
gardens large enough for all delight and too small, as 
they should be, to be amazing; and with ranges be- 
tween them of great apartments at whose hugely 
recessed windows you may turn from Vandyck and 
Eembrandt, to glance down the clifF-like pile into the 
Avon, washing the base like a lordly moat, with its 
bridge, and its trees, and its memories, — they mark the 
very model of a great hereditary dwelling, — one which 
amply satisfies the imagination without irritating the 
democratic conscience. The pictures at Warwick re- 
minded me afresh of an old conclusion on this matter ; 
that the best fortune for good pictures is not to be 
crowded into public collections, — not even into the 
relative privacy of Salons Carres and Tribunes, — but to 
hang in largely spaced half-dozens on the walls of fine 
houses. Here the historical atmosphere, as one may 
call it, is almost a compensation for the often imperfect 
light. If this is true of most pictures, it is especially 
so of the works of Vandyck, whom you think of, wher- 
ever you may find him, as having, with that immense 
good-breeding which is the stamp of his manner, taken 
account in his painting of the local conditions, and pre- 
destined his picture to just the spot where it hangs. 
This is, in fact, an illusion as regards the Vandycks at 



32 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

Warwick, for none of them represent members of the 
house. The very finest, perhaps, after the great mel- 
ancholy, picturesque Charles I., — death, or at least the 
presentiment of death on the pale horse, — is a portrait 
from the Brignole palace at Genoa ; a beautiful noble 
matron in black, with her little son and heir. The last 
Vandycks I had seen were the noble company this lady 
had left behind her in the Genoese palace, and as I 
looked at her, I thought of her mighty change of cir- 
cumstance. Here she sits in the mild light of midmost 
England : there you could almost fancy her blinking in 
the great glare sent up from the Mediterranean. Pic- 
turesque for picturesque, I hardly know which to 
choose. 



NORTH DEVON. 

FOE those fanciful observers to whom broad Eng- 
land means chiefly the perfection of the rural 
picturesque, Devonshire means the perfection of Eng- 
land. I, at least, had so complacently taken it for 
granted that all the characteristic graces of English 
scenery are here to be found in especial exuberance, 
that before we fairly crossed the border I had begun to 
look impatiently from the carriage window for the ver- 
itable landsc^e in water-colors. Devonshire meets 
you promptly in all its purity. In the course of ten 
minutes you have been able to glance down the green 
vista of a dozen Devonshire lanes. On huge embank- 
ments of moss and turf, smothered in wild flowers 
and embroidered with the finest lace-work of trailing 
ground-ivy, rise solid walls of flowering thorn and glis- 
tening holly and golden broom, and more strong, homely 
shrubs than I can name, and toss their blooming tangle 
to a sky which seems to look down between them, 
in places, from but a dozen inches of blue. They are 
overstrewn with lovely little flowers with names as 
delicate as their petals of gold and silver and azure, — 
bird's-eye and king's-finger and wandering-sailor, — and 

2* c 



34 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

their soil, a superb dark red, turns in spots so nearly to 
crimson that you almost fancy it some fantastic com- 
pound purchased at the chemist's and scattered there 
for ornament. The mingled reflection of this rich-hued 
earth and the dim green light which filters through 
the hedge is a masterpiece of local color. A Devon- 
shire cottage is no less striking a local "institution." 
Crushed beneath its burden of thatch, coated with a 
rough white stucco of a tone to delight a painter, nes- 
tling in deep foliage, and garnished at doorstep and 
wayside with various forms of chubby infancy, it seems 
to have been stationed there for no more obvious pur- 
pose than to keep a promise to your fancy, though it 
covers, I suppose, not a little of the sordid misery 
which the fancy loves to forget. 

I rolled past lanes and cottages to Exeter, where I 
found a cathedral. When one has fairly tasted of the 
pleasure of cathedral-hunting, the approach to each new 
shrine gives a peculiarly agreeable zest to one's curios- 
ity. You are making a collection of great impressions, 
and I think the process is in no case so delightful as 
applied to cathedrals. Going from one fine picture to 
another is certainly good ; but the fine pictures of the 
world are terribly numerous, and they have a trouble- 
some way of crowding and jostling each other in the 
memory. The number of cathedrals is small, and the 
mass and presence of each specimen is great, so that, as 
they rise in the mind in individual majesty, they dwarf 
all common impressions. They form, indeed, but a 
gallery of vaster pictures ; for, when time has dulled 
the recollection of details, you retain a single broad 



NOETH DEVON. 35 

image of the vast gray edifice, with its towers, its tone 
of color, and its still, green precinct. All this is 
especially true, perhaps, of one's memory of English 
cathedrals, which are almost alone in possessing, as 
pictures, the setting of a spacious and harmonious close. 
The cathedral stands supreme, but the close makes 
the scene. Exeter is not one of the grandest, but, in 
common with great and small, it has certain points 
on which local science expatiates with peculiar pride. 
Exeter, indeed, does itself injustice by a low, dark 
front, which not only diminishes the apparent altitude 
of the nave, but conceals, as you look eastward, two 
noble Norman towers. The front, however, which has 
a gloomy picturesqueness, is redeemed by two fine fea- 
tures : a magnificent rose-window, whose vast stone 
ribs (inclosing some very pallid last-century glass) are 
disposed with the most charming intricacy ; and a long 
sculptured screen, — a sort of stony band of images, — 
which traverses the facade from side to side. The 
little broken- visaged effigies of saints and kings and 
bishops, niched in tiers along this hoary wall, are pro- 
digiously black and quaint and primitive in expression ; 
and as you look at them Avith whatever contemplative 
tenderness your trade of hard-working tourist may 
have left at your disposal, you fancy that somehow 
they are consciously historical, — • sensitive victims of 
time ; that they feel the loss of their noses, their toes, 
and their crowns ; and tliat, when the long June twi- 
light turns at last to a deeper gray and the quiet of the 
close to a deeper stillness, they begin to peer sidewise 
out of their narrow recesses, and to converse in some 



36 . TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

strange form of early English, as rigid, yet as candid, 
as their features and postures, moaning, like a company 
of ancient paupers round a hospital fire, over their 
aches and infirmities and losses, and the sadness of 
being so terribly old. The vast square transeptal tow- 
ers of the church seem to me to have the same sort of 
personal melancholy. Nothing in all architecture ex- 
presses better, to my imagination, the sadness of survi- 
val, the resignation of dogged material continuance, 
than a broad expanse of ]N"orman stonework, roughly 
adorned with its low relief of short columns, and round 
arches, and almost barbarous hatchet- work, and lifted 
high into that mild English light which accords so well 
with its dull-gray surface. The especial secret of the 
impressiveness of such a N"orman tower I cannot pre- 
tend to have discovered. It lies largely in the look of 
having been proudly and sturdily built, — as if the ma- 
sons had been urged by a trumpet-blast, and the stones 
squared by a battle-axe, — contrasted with this mere 
idleness of antiquity and passive lapse into quaintness. 
A Greek temple preserves a kind of fresh immortality 
in its concentrated refinement, and a Gothic cathedral 
in its adventurous exuberance ; but a Norman tower 
stands up like some simple strong man in his might, 
bending a melancholy brow upon an age which de- 
mands that strength shall be cunning. 

The North Devon coast, whither it was my design 
on coming to Exeter to proceed, has the primary merit 
of being, as yet, virgin soil as to railways. I went 
accordingly from Barnstaple to Ilfracombe on the top 
of a coach, in the fashion of elder days ; and, thanks 



NORTH DEVON. ' 37 

to my position, I managed to enjoy the landscape in 
spite of the two worthy Englishmen before me who 
were reading aloud together, with a natural glee which 
might have passed for fiendish malice, the Daily Tel- 
egraph's painfully vivid account of the defeat of the 
Atalanta crew. It seemed to me, I remember, a sort 
of pledge and token of the invincibility of English 
muscle that a newspaper record of its prowess should 
have power to divert my companions' eyes from the 
bosky flanks of Devonshire combes. The little water- 
ing-place of Ilfracombe is seated at the lower verge 
of one of these seaward-plunging valleys, between a 
couple of magnificent headlands which hold it in a 
hollow slope and offer it securely to the caress of the 
Bristol Channel. It is a very finished little specimen 
of its genus, and I think that during my short stay 
there I expended as much attention on its manners 
and customs and its social physiognomy as on its cliffs 
and beach and great coast- view. My chief conclusion, 
perhaps, from all these things, was that the terrible 
summer question which works annual anguish in so 
many American households would be vastly simplified 
if we had a few Ilfracombes scattered along our Atlan- 
tic coast; and furthermore, that the English are masters 
of the art of uniting the picturesque with the comfort- 
able, — in such proportions, at least, as may claim the 
applause of a race whose success has as yet been con- 
fined to an ingenious combination of their opposites. 
It is just possible that at Ilfracombe the comfortable 
weighs down the scale ; so very substantial is it, so 
very of&cious and business-like. On the left of the 



38 TKANS ATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

town (to give an example), one of the great cliffs I 
have mentioned rises in a couple of massive peaks, and 
presents to the sea an almost vertical face, all muffled 
in tufts of golden broom and mighty fern. You have 
not walked fifty yards away from the hotel before you 
encounter half a dozen little sign-boards, directing 
your steps to a path up the cliff'. You follow their 
indications, and you arrive at a little gate-house, with 
photographs and various local gimcracks exposed for 
sale. A most respectable person appears, demands a 
penny, and, on receiving it, admits you with great ci- 
vility to commune Avith nature. You detect, however, 
various little influences hostile to perfect communion. 
You are greeted by another sign-board threatening legal 
pursuit if you attempt to evade the payment of the 
sacramental penny. The path, winding in a hundred 
ramifications over the cliff, is fastidiously solid and 
neat, and furnished at intervals of a dozen yards with 
excellent benches, inscribed by knife and pencil w^ith 
the names of such visitors as do not happen to have 
been the elderly maiden ladies who now chiefly occupy 
them. All this is prosaic, and you have to subtract it 
in a lump from the total impression before the sense of 
pure nature becomes distinct. Your subtraction made, 
a great deal assuredly remains ; quite enough, I found, 
to give me an ample day's entertainment : for English 
scenery, like everything else that England produces, is 
of a quality that wears well. The cliffs are superb, the 
play of light and shade upon them is a perpetual study, 
and the air a delicious mixture of the mountain-breeze 
and the sea-breeze. I was very glad, at the end of my 



NORTH DEVON. ' 39 

climb, to have a good bench to sit upon, — as one must 
think twice in England before measuring one's length 
on the grassy earth ; and to be able, thanks to the 
smooth foot-path, to get back to the hotel in a quarter 
of an hour. But it occurred to me that if I were an 
Englishman of the period, and, after ten months of a 
busy London life, my fancy were turning to a holiday, 
to rest, and change, and oblivion of the ponderous 
social burden, it might find rather less inspiration than 
needful in a vision of the little paths of IKracombe, of 
the sign-boards and the penny fee and the solitude 
tempered by old ladies and sheep. I wondered whether 
change perfect enough to be salutary does not imply 
something more pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed 
from that deep-bosomed ISTature to which the over- 
wrought mind reverts with passionate longing ; some- 
thing, in short, which is attainable at a moderate dis- 
tance from New York and Boston. I must add that I 
cannot find in my heart to object, even on grounds the 
most sesthetic, to the very beautiful and excellent hotel 
at Ilfracombe, where such of my readers as are per- 
chance actually wrestling with the summer question 
may be interested to learn that one may live en pension, 
very well indeed, at a cost of ten shillings a day. I 
have paid very much more at some of our more modest 
summer resorts for very much less. I made the ac- 
quaintance at this establishment of that somewhat 
anomalous institution, the British table d'hote, but I 
confess that, faithful to the duty of a sentimental tour- 
ist, I have retained a more vivid impression of the talk 
and the faces than of our entrees and releves. I noticed 



40 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

here what I have often noticed before (the fact perhaps 
has never been duly recognized), that no people profit 
so eagerly as the English by the suspension of a com- 
mon social law. A table d'hote, being something ab- 
normal and experimental, as it were, it produced, appar- 
ently, a complete reversal of the national characteris- 
tics. Conversation was universal, — uproarious, almost ; 
and I have met no vivacious Latin more confidential 
than a certain neighbor of mine, no speculative Yankee 
more inquisitive. 

These are meagre memories, however, compared with 
those which cluster about that enchanting spot which 
is known in vulgar prose as Lynton. I am afraid I 
should seem an even more sentimental tourist than I 
pretend to be if I were to declare how vulgar all prose 
appears to me applied to Lynton with descriptive in- 
tent. The little village is perched on the side of one 
of the great mountain cliffs with which this whole 
coast is adorned, and on the edge of a lovely gorge 
through which a broad hill-torrent foams and tumbles 
from the great moors whose heather-crested waves rise 
purple along the inland sky. Below it, close beside the 
beach, where the little torrent meets the sea, is the 
sister village of Lynmouth. Here — as I stood on the 
bridge that spans the stream and looked at the stony 
backs and foundations and over clambering garden ver- 
dure of certain little gray old houses which plunge their 
feet into it, and then up at the tender green of scrub- 
oak and ferns and the flaming yellow of golden broom 
climbing the sides of the hills, and leaving them bare- 
crowned to the sun, like miniature mountains — I could 



NORTH DEVON. 41 

have fancied the British Channel as blue as the Medi- 
terranean and the village about me one of the hundred 
hamlets of the Eiviera. The little Castle Hotel at Lyn- 
ton is a spot so consecrated to delicious repose, — to sit- 
ting with a book in the terrace-garden among blooming 
plants of aristocratic magnitude and rarity, and watch- 
ing the finest piece of color in all nature, — the glowing 
red and green of the great cliifs beyond the little har- 
bor-mouth, as they shift and change and melt the live- 
long day, from shade to shade and ineffable tone to 
tone, — that I feel as if in helping it to publicity I were 
doing it rather a disfavor than a service. It is in fact 
a very charming little abiding-place, and I have never 
known one where purchased hospitality wore a more 
disinterested smile. Lynton is of course a capital cen- 
tre for excursions, but two or three of which I had time 
to make. None is more beautiful than a simple walk 
along the running face of the cliffs to a singular rocky 
eminence whose curious abutments and pinnacles of 
stone have caused it to be named the " Castle." It has 
a fantastic resemblance to some hoary feudal ruin, with 
crumbling towers and gaping chambers, tenanted by 
wild sea-birds. The late afternoon light had a way, 
while I was at Lynton, of lingering on until within a 
couple of hours of midnight ; and I remember among 
the charmed moments of English travel none of a more 
vividly poetical tinge than a couple of evenings spent 
on the summit of this all but legendary pile, in company 
with the slow-coming darkness, and the short, sharp 
cry of the sea-mews. There are places whose very as- 
pect is a story. This jagged and pinnacled coast- wall. 



42 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

with the rock-strewn valley behind it, into the shadow 
of one of whose bowlders, in the foreground, the glance 
wandered in search of the lurking signature of Gustave 
Dore, belonged certainly, if not to history, to legend. 
As I sat watching the sullen calmness of the unbroken 
tide at the dreadful base of the cliffs (where they divide 
into low sea-caves, making pillars and pedestals for the 
fantastic imagery of their summits), I kept forever re- 
peating, as if they contained a spell, half a dozen words 
from Tennyson's " Idyls of the King," — 

" On wild Tiutagil, by the Cornish sea." 

False as they v\^ere to the scene geographically, they 
seemed somehow to express its essence ; and, at any 
rate, I leave it to any one who has lingered there with 
the lingering twilight to say whether you can respond 
to the almost mystical picturesqueness of the place 
better than by spouting some sonorous line from an 
English poet. 

The last stage in my visit to N"orth Devon was the 
long drive along the beautiful remnant of coast and 
through the rich pastoral scenery of Somerset. The 
whole broad spectacle that one dreams of viewing in a 
foreign land to the homely music of a postboy's whip, 
I beheld on this admirable drive, — breezy highlands 
clad in the warm blue-brown of heather-tufts, as if in 
mantles of rusty velvet, little bays and coves curving 
gently to the doors of clustered fishing-huts, deep pas- 
tures and broad forests, villages thatched and trellised as 
if to take a prize for local color, manor-tops peeping over 
rook-haunted avenues. I ought to make especial note 



NORTH DEVON. 43 

of an hour I spent at midday at the little village of 
Poiiock, in Somerset. Here the thatcli seemed steeper 
and heavier, the yellow roses on the cottage walls more 
cunningly mated with the crumbling stucco, the dark 
interiors within the open doors more quaintly pictorial, 
than elsewhere ; and as I loitered, while the horses 
rested, in the little cool old timber-steepled, yew-shaded 
church, betwixt the high-backed manorial pew and tlie 
battered tomb of a crusading knight and his lady, and 
listened to the simple prattle of a blue-eyed old sexton, 
who showed me where, as a boy, in scantier corduroys, 
he had scratched his name on the recumbent lady's 
breast, it seemed to me that this at last was old Eng- 
land indeed, and that in a moment more I should see 
Sir Eoger de Coverley marching up the aisle ; for cer- 
tainly, to give a proper account of it all, I should need 
nothing less than the pen of Mr. Addison. 



WELLS AND SALISBURY. 

THE pleasantest things in life, and perhaps the 
rarest, are its agreeable surprises. Things are 
often worse than we expect to find them; and when 
they are better, we may mark the day with a white 
stone. These reflections are as pertinent to man as a 
tourist as to any other phase of his destiny, and I re- 
cently had occasion to make them in the ancient city 
of Wells. I knew in a general way that it had a 
great cathedral to show, but I was far from suspecting 
the precious picturesqueness of the little town. The 
immense predominance of the Minster towers, as you 
see them from the approaching train over the clustered 
houses at their feet, gives you indeed an intimation of 
it, and suggests that the city is nothing if not ecclesias- 
tical ; but I can wish the traveller no better fortune 
than to stroll forth in the early evening with as large a 
reserve of ignorance as my own, and treat himself to 
an hour of discoveries. I was lodged on the edge of 
Cathedral Green, and I had only to pass beneath one of 
the three crumbling Priory gates which enclose it, and 
cross the vast grassy oval, to stand before a minster- 
front which ranks among the first three or four in Eng- 



WELLS AND SALISBURY. 45 

land. Wells Cathedral is extremely fortunate in being 
approached by this wide green level, on which the 
spectator may loiter and stroll to and fro, and shift his 
stand-point to his heart's content. The spectator who 
does not hesitate to avail himself of his privilege of un- 
limited fastidiousness might indeed pronounce it too 
isolated for perfect picturesqueness, — too uncontrasted 
with the profane architecture of the human homes for 
which it pleads to the skies. But, in fact, Wells is not 
a city with a cathedral for a central feature ; but a cathe- 
dral with a little city gathered at its base, and forming 
hardly more than an extension of its spacious close. 
You feel everywhere the presence of the beautiful 
church ; the place seems always to savor of a Sunday 
afternoon ; and you fancy that every house is tenanted 
by a canon, a prebendary, or a precentor. 

The great facade is remarkable not so much for its 
expanse as for its elaborate elegance. It consists of 
two great truncated towers, divided by a broad centre, 
bearing beside its rich fretwork of statues three narrow 
lancet windows. The statues on this vast front are the 
great boast of the cathedral. They number, with the 
lateral figures of the towers, no less than three hundred; 
it seems densely embroidered by the chisel. They are 
disposed in successive niches, along six main vertical 
shafts ; the central windows are framed and divided by 
narrower shafts, and the wall above them rises into a 
pinnacled screen, traversed by two superb horizontal 
rows. Add to these a close-runninoj cornice of images 
along the line corresponding with the summit of the 
aisles, and the tiers which complete the decoration of the 



46 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

towers on either side, and you have an immense system 
of images, governed by a quaint theological order and 
most impressive in its completeness. Many of the 
little high-lodged effigies are mutilated, and not a few 
of the niches are empty, but the injury of time is 
not sufficient to diminish the noble serenity of the 
building. The injury of time is indeed being hand- 
somely repaired, for the front is partly masked by a 
slender scaffolding. The props and platforms are of the 
most delicate structure, and look, in fact, as if they 
were meant to facilitate no more ponderous labor than 
a fitting-on of noses to disfeatured bishops, and a re- 
arrangement of the mantle-folds of straitlaced queens, 
discomposed by the centuries. The main beauty of 
Wells Cathedral, to my mind, is not its more or less 
visible wealth of detail, but its singularly charming 
tone of color. An even, sober, mouse-colored gray 
covers it from summit to base, deepening nowhere to 
the melancholy black of your truly romantic Gothic, 
but showing, as yet, none of the spotty brightness of 
" restoration." It was a wonderful fact, that the great 
towers, from their lofty outlook, see never a factory 
chimney, — those cloud-compelling spires which so 
often break the charm of the softest English horizons ; 
and the general atmosphere of Wells seemed to me, for 
some reason, peculiarly luminous and sweet. The cathe- 
dral has never been discolored by the moral malaria 
of a city with an independent secular life. As you 
turn back from its portal and glance at the open lawn 
before it, edged by the mild gray Elizabethan deanery, 
and the other dwellings, hardly less stately, which seem 



i 



WELLS AND SALISBUEY. 47 

to reflect in their comfortable fronts the rich respecta- 
bility of the church, and then up again at the beau- 
tiful clear-hued pile, you may fancy it less a temple for 
man's needs than a monument of his pride, — less a 
fold for the flock than for the shepherds, — a visible 
sign that, besides the actual assortment of heavenly 
thrones, there is constantly on hand a choice lot of 
cushioned cathedral stalls. Within the cathedral this 
impression is not diminished. The interior is vast and 
massive, but it lacks incident, — the incident of monu- 
ments, sepulchres, and chapels, — and it is too brilliant- 
ly lighted for picturesque, as distinguished from strictly 
architectural, interest. Under this latter head it has, I 
believe, great importance. Eor myself, I can think of 
it only as I saw it from my place in the choir during 
afternoon service of a hot Sunday. The Bishop sat 
facing me, enthroned in a stately Gothic alcove, and 
clad in his crimson band, his lawn sleeves, and his 
lavender gloves ; the canons, in their degree, with the 
archdeacons, as I suppose, reclined comfortably in the 
carven stalls, and the scanty congregation fringed the 
broad-aisle. But though scanty, the congregation was 
select ; it was unexceptionably black-coated, bonneted, 
and gloved. It savored intensely, in short, of that in- 
exorable gentility which the English put on with tlieir 
Sunday bonnets and beavers, and which fills me — as a 
purely sentimental tourist — with a sort of fond re- 
actionary remembrance of those animated bundles of 
rags which one sees kneeling in the churches of Italy. 
But even here, as a purely sentimental tourist, I found 
my account : one always does in some little corner in 



48 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

England. Before me and beside me sat a row of the 
comeliest young men, clad in black gowns, and wearing 
on their shoulders long hoods trimmed with white fur. 
Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred 
not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so 
mediseval as they looked. 

My fancy found its account even better in the sin- 
gular quaintness of the little precinct known as the 
Vicars' Close. It directly adjoins the Cathedral Green, 
and you enter it beneath one of the solid old gate- 
houses which form so striking an element in the eccle- 
siastical furniture of Wells. It consists of a narrow, 
oblong court, bordered on each side with thirteen small 
dwellings, and terminating in a ruinous little chapel. 
Here formerly dwelt a congregation of vicars, estab- 
lished in the thirteenth century to do curates' work 
for the canons. The little houses are very much mod- 
ernized ; but they retain their tall chimneys, with 
carven tablets in the face, their antique compactness 
and neatness, and a certain little sanctified air, as of 
cells in a cloister. The place is deliciously picturesque ; 
and, approa,ching it as I did in the first dimness of 
twilight, it looked to me, in its exaggerated perspective, 
like one of those "streets" represented on the stage, 
down whose impossible vista the heroes and confidants 
of romantic comedies come swaggering arm-in-arm, and 
hold amorous converse with the heroines at second-story 
windows. But though the Vicars' Close is a curious 
affair enough, the great boast of Wells is its episcopal 
Palace. The Palace loses nothing from being seen for 
the first time in the kindly twilight, and from being 



WELLS AND SALISBUKY. ' 49 

approached with an -iinexpectant mind. To reach it 
(unless you go from within the cathedral by the clois- 
ters), you pass out of the Green by another ancient 
gateway into the market-place, and thence back again 
through its own peculiar portal. My own first glimpse 
of it had all the felicity of a coup de tJiedtre. I saw 
within the dark archway an enclosure bedimmed at 
once with the shadows of trees and heightened with 
the glitter of water. The picture was worthy of this 
agreeable promise. Its main feature is the little gray- 
walled island on which the Palace stands, rising in 
feudal fashion out of a broad, clear moat, flanked with 
round towers, and approached by a proper drawbridge. 
Along the outer side of the moat is a short walk be- 
neath a row of picturesquely stunted elms ; swans and 
ducks disport themselves in the current and ripple the 
bright shadows of the overclambering plants from the 
episcopal gardens and masses of purple valerian lodged 
on the hoary battlements. On the evening of my visit 
the haymakers were at work on a great sloping field 
in the rear of the Palace, and the sweet perfume of the 
tumbled grass in the dusky air seemed all that was 
wanting to fix the scene forever in the memory. Be- 
yond the moat, and within the gray walls, dwells my 
lord Bishop, in the finest palace in England. The 
mansion dates from the thirteenth century ; but, stately 
dwelling though it is, it occupies but a subordinate 
place in its own grounds. Their great ornament, pic- 
turesquely speaking, is the massive ruin of a banquet- 
ing-hall, erected by a free-living mediaeval bishop, and 
more or less demolished at the Eeformation. With its 



50 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

still perfect towers and beautiful shapely windows, Imng 
with those green tapestries so stoutly woven by the 
English climate, it is a relic worthy of being locked 
away behind an embattled wall. I have among my 
impressions of Wells, besides this picture of the moated 
Palace, half a dozen memories of the pictorial sort, 
which I lack space to transcribe. The clearest im- 
pression, perhaps, is that of the beautiful church of 
St. Cuthbert, of the same date as the cathedral, and in 
very much the same style of elegant, temperate Early 
English. It wears one of the high-soaring towers for 
which Somersetshire is justly celebrated, as you may 
see from the window of the train as you roll past its 
almost top-heavy hamlets. The beautiful old church, 
surrounded with its green graveyard, and large enough 
to be impressive, without being too large (a great merit, 
to my sense) to be easily compassed by a deplorably 
unarchitectural eye, wore a native English expression 
to which certain humble figures in the foreground gave 
additional point. On the edge of the churchyard was 
a low-gabled house, before which four old men were 
gossiping in the eventide. Into the front of the house 
was inserted an antique alcove in stone, divided into 
three shallow little seats, two of which were occupied 
by extraordinary specimens of decrepitude. One of 
these ancient paupers had a huge protuberant forehead, 
and sat with a pensive air, his head gathered painfully 
upon his twisted shoulders, and his legs resting across 
his crutch. The other was rubicund, blear-eyed, and 
frightfully besmeared with snuff. Their voices were 
so feeble and senile that I could scarcely understand 



WELLS AND SALISBURY. 51 

them, and only just managed to make out the answer 
to my inquiry of who and what they were, — " We 're 
Still's Almshouse, sir." 

One of the lions, almost, of Wells (whence it is but 
five miles distant) is the ruin of the famous Abbey of 
Glastonbury, on which Henry YIII., in the language 
of our day, came down so heavily. The ancient splen- 
dor of the architecture survives, but in scattered and 
scanty fragments, among influences of a rather inhar- 
monious sort. It was cattle-market in the little town 
as I passed up the main street, and a savor of hoofs and 
hide seemed to accompany me through the easy laby- 
rinth of the old arches and piers. These occupy a large 
back yard, close behind the street, to which you are 
most prosaically admitted by a young woman who 
keeps a wicket and sells tickets. The continuity of 
tradition is not altogether broken, however, for the 
little street of Glastonbury has rather an old-time 
aspect, and one of the houses at least must have seen 
the last of the abbots ride abroad on his mule. The 
little inn is a capital bit of picturesqueness, and as I 
waited for the 'bus under its low dark archway (in 
something of the mood, possibly, in which a train was 
once waited for at Coventry), and watched the barmaid 
flirting her way to and fro out of the heavy-browed 
kitchen and among the lounging young appraisers of 
colts and steers and barmaids, I might have imagined 
that the merry England of the Tudors w^as not utterly 
dead. A beautiful Encjland this must have been as 
well, if it contained many such abbeys as Glastonbury. 
Such of the ruined columns and portals and windows 



52 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

as still remain are of admirable design and finish. The 
doorways are rich in marginal ornament, — ornament 
within ornament, as it often is ; for the dainty weeds 
and wild-flowers overlace the antique tracery with their 
bright arabesques, and deepen the gray of the stone- 
work, as it brightens their bloom. The thousand flow- 
ers which grow among English ruins deserve a chapter 
to themselves. I owe them, as an observer, a heavy 
debt of satisfaction, but I am too little of a botanist to 
pay them in their own coin. It has often seemed to 
me in England that the purest enjoyment of archi- 
tecture was to be had among the ruins of great build- 
ings. In the perfect building one is rarely sure that 
the impression is simply architectural : it is more or 
less pictorial and sentimental ; it depends partly upon 
association and partly upon various accessories and de- 
tails which, however they may be wrought into har- 
mony with the architectural idea, are not part of its 
essence and spirit. But in so far as beauty of structure 
is beauty of line and curve, balance and harmony of 
masses and dimensions, I have seldom relished it as 
deeply as on the grassy nave of some crumbling church, 
before lonely columns and empty windows, where the 
wild-flowers were a cornice and the sailing clouds a 
roof. The arts certainly have a common element. 
These hoary relics of Glastonbury reminded me in 
their broken eloquence of one of the other great ruins 
of the world, — the Last Supper of Leonardo. A beau- 
tiful shadow, in each case, is all that remains ; but that 
shadow is the artist's thought. 

Salisbury Cathedral, to which I made a pilgrimage 



WELLS AND SALISBURY. 53 

on leaving Wells, is the very reverse of a ruin, and you 
take your pleasure there on very different grounds 
from those I have just attempted to define. It is per- 
haps the best known cathedral in the world, thanks to 
its shapely spire ; but the spire is so simply and obvi- 
ously fair, that when you have respectfully made a note 
of it you have anticipated aesthetic analysis. I had seen 
it before and admired it heartily, and perhaps I should 
have done as well to let my admiration rest. I confess 
that on repeated inspection it grew to seem to me the 
least bit hanal, as the French say, and I began to con- 
sider whether it does not belong to the same range of 
art as the Apollo Belvedere or the Venus de' Medici. 
I am inclined to think that if I had to live within sight 
of a cathedral, and encounter it in my daily comings 
and goings, I should grow less weary of the rugged 
black front of Exeter than of the sweet perfection of 
Salisbury. There are people who become easily sa- 
tiated with blond beauties, and Salisbury Cathedral 
belongs, if I may say so, to the order of blondes. The 
other lions of Salisbury, Stonehenge and Wilton 
House, I revisited with undiminished interest. Stone- 
henge is rather a hackneyed shrine of pilgrimage. At 
the time of my former visit a picnic-party was making 
libations of beer on the dreadful altar-sites. But the 
mighty mystery of the place has not yet been stared 
out of countenance ; and as on this occasion there were 
no picnickers, we were left to drink deep of the har- 
mony of its solemn isolation and its unrecorded past. 
It stands as lonely in history as it does on the great 
plain, whose many -tinted green waves, as they roU 



54 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

away from it, seem to symbolize the ebb of the long 
centuries which have left it so portentously unex- 
plained. You may put a hundred questions to these 
rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation 
of their fallen companions ; but your curiosity falls 
dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them, 
and the strange monument, with all its unspoken mem- 
ories, becomes simply a heart-stirring picture in a land 
of pictures. It is indeed immensely picturesque. At 
a distance, you see it standing in a shallow dell of the 
plain, looking hardly larger than a group of ten-pins 
on a boM^ling-green. I can fancy sitting all a summer's 
day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, 
and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's 
duration and the feeble span of individual experience. 
There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; 
and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a su- 
perficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of 
things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to re- 
mind you of the enormous background of Time. Salis- 
bury is indeed rich in antiquities. Wilton House, a 
delightful old residence of the Earls of Pembroke, 
contains a noble collection of Greek and Eoman mar- 
bles. These are ranged round a charming cloister, 
occupying the centre of the house, which is exhibited 
in the most liberal fashion. Out of the cloister opens 
a series of drawing-rooms hung with family portraits, 
chiefly by Vandyck, all of superlative merit. Among 
them hangs supreme, as the Vandyck jpar excellence, 
the famous and magnificent group of the whole Pem- 
broke family of James I.'s time. This splendid work 



WELLS AND SALISBURY.' 55 

has every pictorial merit, — design, color, elegance, 
force, and finish, and I have been vainly wondering to 
this hour what it needs to be the finest piece of por- 
traiture, as it surely is one of the most ambitious, in 
the world. What it lacks, characteristically, in a cer- 
tain "uncompromising solidity it recovers in the beauti- 
ful dignity of its position — unmoved from the stately 
house in which its author sojourned and wrought, 
familiar to the descendants of its noble originals. 



SWISS NOTES. 

Thusis, August, 1872. 

I HAVE often thought it, intellectually speaking, 
indifferent economy for the American tourist to de- 
vote many of his precious summer days to Switzerland. 
Switzerland represents, generally, nature in the rough, 
and the American traveller in search of novelty enter- 
tains a rational preference for nature in the refined 
state. If he has his European opportunities very much 
at heart, he will be apt to chafe a little on lake-side 
and mountain-side with a sense of the beckoning, un- 
visited cities of Germany, France, and Italy. As to 
the average American tourist, however, as one actually 
meets him, it is hard to say whether he most neglects 
or abuses opportunity. It is beside the mark, at any 
rate, to talk to him about economy. He spends as he 
listeth, and if he overfees the waiters he is frugal of his 
hours. He has long since discovered the art of compre- 
hensive travel, and if you think he had better not be 
in Switzerland — rassurez-vous — he will not be there 
long. I am, perhaps, unduly solicitous for him from a^ 
vague sense of having treated myself to an overdose of 
Switzerland. I relish a human flavor in my pleasures, 
and I fancy that it is a more equal intercourse between 



SWISS NOTES. 57 

man and man than between man and mountain. I 
have found myself grumbling at moments because the 
large-hewn snow-peaks of the Oberland are not the 
marble pinnacles of a cathederal, and the liquid sap- 
phire and emerald of Leman and Lucerne are not firm 
palace-floors of lapis and verd-antique. But, after all, 
there is a foreground in Switzerland as well as a back- 
ground, and more than once, when a mountain has 
stared me out of countenance, I have recovered my 
self-respect in a sympathetic gaze at the object which 
here corresponds to the Yankee town-pump. Swiss 
village fountains are delightful ; the homely village life 
centres about the great stone basin (roughly inscribed, 
generally, with an antique date), where the tinkling 
cattle drink, where the lettuce and the linen are 
washed, where dusty pedestrians, with their lips at 
the spout, need scarcely devote their draught to the 
" health " of the brawny beauties who lean, brown- 
armed, over the trough, and the plash of the cool, hard 
water is heard at either end of the village street. But 
I am surely not singular in my impulse thus occasion- 
ally to weigh detail against mass in Switzerland ; and 
I apprehend that, unless you are a regular climber, or 
an sesthetic Buddhist, as it were, content with a purely 
contemplative enjoyment of natural beauty, you are 
obliged eventually in self-defence to lower, by an im- 
aginative effort, the sky-line of your horizon. You 
may sit for days before the hotel at Grindelwald, look- 
ing at the superb snow-crested granite of the Wetter- 
horn, if you have a slowly ripening design of measuring 
your legs, your head, and your wind against it; and 

3* 



58 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

a fortiori, the deed being done, you may spend another 
week in the same position, sending up patronizing 
looks at those acres of ice which the foolish cockneys 
at your side take to be inches. But there is a limit to 
the satisfaction with which you can sit staring at a 
mountain — even the most beautiful — which you have 
neither ascended nor are likely to ascend ; and I know 
of nothing to which I can better compare the effect on 
your nerves of what comes to seem to you, at last, its 
inhuman want of condescension than that of the ex- 
pression of back of certain persons whom you come as 
near detesting as your characteristic amiability per- 
mits. I appeal on this point to all poor mountaineers. 
They might reply, however, that one should be either 
a good climber or a good idler. 

If there is truth in this retort, it may help to explain 
an old-time kindness of mine for Geneva, to which I 
was introduced years ago, in my school-days, when I 
was as good an idler as the best. And I ought in jus- 
tice to say that, with Geneva for its metropolis, Swit- 
zerland may fairly pretend to possess something more 
than nature in the rough. A Swiss novelist of incom- 
parable talent has indeed written a tale expressly to 
prove that frank nature is wofully out of favor there, 
and his heroine dies of a broken heart because her 
spontaneity passes for impropriety. I don't know 
whether M. Cherbuliez's novel is as veracious as it is 
clever ; but the susceptible stranger certainly feels that 
the Swiss metropolis is a highly artificial compound. 
It makes little difference that the individuality of the 
place is a moral rather than an architectural one ; for 



SWISS NOTES. 59 

the streets and houses express it as clearly as if it were 
syllabled in their stones. The moral tone of Geneva, 
as I imagine it, is epigrammatically, but on the whole 
justly, indicated by the fact, recently related to me by a 
discriminating friend, that, meeting one day in the 
street a placard of the theatre, superscribed Boitffes- 
Genevois, he burst into irrepressible laughter. To ap- 
preciate the irony of the phrase, one must have lived 
loner enouoii in Geneva to suffer from the want of hu- 
mor in the local atmosphere, and the absence, as well, 
of that sesthetic character begotten of a generous 
view of life. There is no Genevese architecture, nor 
museum, nor theatre, nor music, not even a worthy 
promenade, — all prime requisites of a well-appointed 
foreign capital ; and yet somehow Geneva manages to 
assert herself powerfully without them, and to leave 
the impression of a strongly featured little city, which, 
if you do not enjoy, you may at least grudgingly re- 
spect. It was, perhaps, the absence of these frivolous 
attributes which caused it to be thought a proper 
place for the settlement of our solemn wrangle with 
England, — though surely a community which could 
make a joke would have afforded worthier spectators 
to certain phases of the affair. But there is such a 
thing, after all, as drawing too sober-colored a picture 
of the Presbyterian mother-city, and I suddenly find 
myself wondering whether, if it were not the most re- 
spectable of capitals, it Avould not still be the prettiest ; 
whetlier its main interest is not, possibly, the pictu- 
resque one, — the admirable contrast of the dark, home- 
ly-featured mass of the town, relieved now, indeed. 



60 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

at the water's edge by a sliining rim of wliite-walled 
hotels, — and the incomparable vivacity of color of the 
blue lake and Khone. This divinely cool-hued gush of 
the Ehone beneath the two elder bridges is one of the 
loveliest things in Switzerland, and ought itself to 
make the fortune of unnumbered generations of inn- 
kee^^ers. As you linger and watch the shining tide, 
you make a rather vain effort to connect it with the 
two great human figures in the Genevese picture, — 
Calvin and Eousseau. It seems to have no great af- 
finity with either genius, — one of which it might 
have brightened and the other have cleansed. There 
is indeed in Rousseau a strong limpidity of style which, 
if we choose, we may fancy an influence from the rush- 
ing stream he must so often have tarried in his boyish 
breeches to peep at between the bridge-rails ; but I 
doubt whether we can twist the Ehone into a channel for 
even the most diluted Calvinism. It must have seemed 
to the grim Doctor as one of the streams of the para- 
dise he was making it so hard to enter. For ourselves, 
as it hurries undarkened past the gray theological city, 
we may liken it to the impetus of faith shooting in 
deep indifference past the doctrine of election. The 
genius that contains the clearest strain of this anti- 
Calvinistic azure is decidedly that of Byron. He has 
versified the lake in the finest Byronic manner, and I 
have seen its color, of a bright day, as beautiful, as 
unreal, as romantic as the most classical passages of 
" Childe Harold." Its shores have not yet lost the echo 
of three other eminent names, — those of Voltaire, of 
Gibbon, and of Madame de Stael. These great writers, 



SWISS NOTES. 61 

however, were all such sturdy non-conductors of the 
modern tendency of landscape to make its way into 
literature, that the tourist hardly feels himself in- 
debted to their works for a deeper relish of the lake 

— though, indeed, they have bequeathed him the op- 
portunity for a charming threefold pilgrimage. About 
Ferney and Coppet I might say a dozen things which 
the want of space forbids. As for the author of that 
great chronicle which never is but always to be read, 
you may take your coffee of a morning in the little 
garden in which he wrote finis to his immortal work, 

— and if the coffee is good enough to administer a 
fillip to your fancy, perhaps you may yet hear the 
faint reverberation among the trees of the long, long 
breath with which he must have laid down his pen. 
It is, to my taste, quite the reverse of a profanation to 
commemorate a classic site by a good inn; and the 
excellent Hotel Gibbon at Lausanne, ministering to 
that larger perception which is almost identical with 
the aftertaste of a good cuisine, may fairly pretend to 
propagate the exemplary force of a great human ef- 
fort. There is a charming Hotel Byron at Villeneuve, 
the eastern end of the lake, of which I have retained 
a kindlier memory than of any of my Swiss resting- 
places. It has about it a kind of mellow gentility 
which is equally rare and delightful, and which per- 
haps rests partly on the fact that — owing, I suppose, 
to the absence just thereabouts of what is technically 
termed a "feature " — it is generally just thinly enough 
populated to make you wonder how it can pay, and 
whether the landlord is not possibly entertaining you at 



62 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

a sacrifice. It has none of that look of heated pros- 
perity which has come of late years to intermingle so 
sordid an element with the pure grandeur of Swiss 
scenery. 

The crowd in Switzerland demands a chapter by 
itself, and when I pause in the anxious struggle for 
bed and board to take its prodigious measure, — and, 
in especial, to comprehend its huge main factor, the 
terrible German element, — mountains and men seem 
to resolve themselves into a single monstrous mass, 
darkening the clear heaven of rest and leisure. Cross- 
ing lately the lovely Scheideck pass, from Grindelwald 
to Meyringen, I needed to remember well that this is 
the great thoroughfare of Swiss travel, and that I might 
elsewhere find some lurking fragment of landscape 
without figures, — or with fewer, — not to be dismayed 
by its really grotesque appearance. It is hardly an 
exaggeration to say that the road was black with way- 
farers. They darkened the slopes like the serried pine 
forests, they dotted the crags and fretted the sky-line 
like far-browsing goats, and their great collective hum 
rose up to heaven like the uproar of a dozen torrents. 
More recently, I strolled down from Andermatt on the 
St. Gothard to look at that masterpiece of sternly ro- 
mantic landscape, the Devil's Bridge. Huge walls of 
black granite inclose the scene, the road spans a tre- 
mendous yellow cataract which flings an icy mist all 
abroad, and a savage melancholy, in fine, marks the 
spot for her own. But half a dozen carriages, jingling 
cheerily up the ascent, had done their best to dispos- 
sess her. The parapet of the bridge was adorned with 



SWISS NOTES. 63 

as many gazers as that of the Pont Neuf when one 
of its classic anglers has proclaimed a bite, and I was 
obliged to confess that I had missed the full force of a 
sensation. If the reader's sympathies are touched by 
my discomfiture, I may remind him that though, as a 
fastidious few, we laugh at Mr. Cook, the great entre- 
preneur of travel, with his coupons and his caravans 
of "personally -conducted" sight -seers, we have all 
pretty well come to belong to his party in one way or 
another. We complain of a hackneyed and cocknified 
Europe ; but wherever, in desperate quest of the un- 
trodden, we carry our much-labelled luggage, our bad 
French, our demand for a sitz-bath and pale ale, we rub 
off the precious primal bloom of the picturesque and 
establish a precedent for unlimited intrusion. I have 
even fancied that it is a sadly ineffectual pride that 
prevents us from buying one of Mr. Cook's little bun- 
dles of tickets, and saving our percentage, whatever it 
is, of money and trouble ; for I am sure that the poor 
bewildered and superannuated genius of the old Grand 
Tour, as it was taken forty years ago, wherever she 
may have buried her classic head, beyond hearing of 
the eternal telegraphic click bespeaking "rooms" on 
mountain-tops, confounds us all alike in one sweeping 
reprobation. 

I might, perhaps, have purchased exemption from 
her curse by idling the summer away in the garden of 
the Hotel Byron, or by contenting myself with such 
wanderings as you may enjoy on the neighboring hill- 
sides. The great beauty of detail in this region seems 
to me to have been insufiiciently noted. People come 



64 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

hither, indeed, in swarms, but they talk more of places 
that are not half so lovely ; and when, returning from a 
walk over the slopes above Montreux, I have ventured 
to hint at a few of the fine things I have seen, I have 
been treated as if I were jealous, forsooth, of a pro- 
jected tour to Chamouni. These slopes climb the 
great hills in almost park-like stretches of verdure, 
studded with generous trees, among which the w^alnut 
abounds, and into which, as you look down, the lake 
seems to fling up a blue reflection which, by contrast, 
turns their green leaves to yellow. Here you may 
wander through wood and dell, by stream and meadow, 
— streams that narrow as they wind ever upward, and 
meadows often so steep that the mowers, as they swing 
their scythes over them, remind you of insects on a 
wall brandishing long antenncB, — and range through 
every possible phase of sweet sub-Alpine scenery. 
I^owhere, I imagine, can you better taste the charm, as 
distinguished from the grandeur, of Swiss landscape ; 
and as in Switzerland the grandeur and the charm are 
constantly interfused and harmonized, you have only to 
ramble far enough and high enough to get a hint of 
real mountain sternness, — to overtake the topmost 
edge of the woods and emerge upon the cool, sunny 
places where the stillness is broken only by cattle-bells 
and the plash of streams, and the snow-patches, in the 
darker nooks, linger till midsummer. If this does not 
satisfy you, you may do a little mild mountaineering 
by climbing the Eochers de Noye or the Dent de 
Jaman, — a miniature Matterhorn. But the most 
profitable paths, to my taste, are certain broad-flagged. 



^ 



SWISS NOTES. 65 

grass-grown footways, which lead you through densely 
fruited orchards to villages of a charming quaintness, 
nestling often in so close a verdure that from the road 
by the lake you hardly suspect them. The pictu- 
resqueness of Vaudois village life ought surely to have 
produced more sketchers and lyrists. The bit of coun- 
try between Montreux and Vevay, though disfigured 
with an ugly fringe of vineyards near the lake, is a 
perfect nest of these fantastic hamlets. The houses 
are, for the most part, a delightfully irregular combina- 
tion of the chalet and the rustic maison lourgeoise ; 
and — with their rugged stony foundations, pierced 
with a dusky stable-arch and topped with a random 
superstructure of balconies, outer stairways, and gables, 
weather-browned beams and sun-cracked stucco, their 
steep red roofs with knob-crowned turrets, their little 
cobble-paved courts, with the great stone fountain and 
its eternal plash — they are at once so pleasantly gro- 
tesque and yet so sturdily well-conditioned, that their 
aspect seems a sort . of influence from the blue glitter 
of the lake as it plays through the trees with genial 
invraisemUance. The little village of Veytaux, above 
Chillon, where it lurks unperceived among its foliage, 
is an admirable bit of this Vaudois picturesqueness. 
The little grassy main street of the village enters and 
passes bodily through a house, — converting it into a 
vast dim, creaking, homely archway, — with an au- 
dacity, a frank self-abandonment to local color, which 
is one of the finest strokes of the sort I ever encoun- 
tered. And yet three English sisters whom I used to 
meet thereabouts had preferred one morning to station 



66 TEANSATL ANTIC SKETCHES. 

tliemselves at the parapet of the road by the lake, and, 
spreadmg their sketch-books there, to expend their pre- 
cious little tablets of Winsor & E'ewton on those too, 
too familiar walls and towers where Byron's Boninvard 
languished. Even as I passed, the railway train 
whizzed by beneath their noses, and the genius loci 
seemed to flee howling in the shriek of its signal. 
Temple Bar itself witnesses a scarcely busier coming 
and going than, in these days, those hoary portals of 
Chillon. My own imagination, on experiment, proved 
too poor an alchemist, and such enjoyment as I got of 
the castle was mainly my distant daily view of it from 
the garden of the Hotel Byron, — a little, many-pinna- 
cled white promontory, shiniiig against the blue lake. 
When I went, Badeker in hand, to " do " the place, I 
found a huge concourse of visitors awaiting the reflux 
of an earlier w^ave. " Let us at least wait till there 
is no one else," I said to my companion. She smiled 
in compassion of my naivete, " There is never no one 
else',' she answered. "We must treat it as a crush 
or leave it alone." 

Any truly graceful picturesqueness here is the more 
carefully to be noted that the graceful in Switzerland 
— especially in the German cantons — is a very rare 
commodity, and that everything that is not rigorously a 
mountain or a valley is distinctly tainted with ugliness. 
The Swiss have, apparently, an insensibility to comeli- 
ness or purity of form, — a partiality to the clumsy, 
coarse, and prosaic which one might almost interpret 
as a calculated oflset to their great treasure of natural 
beauty, or at least as an instinctive protest of the na- 



SWISS NOTES. 67 

tional genius for frugality. Monte Eosa and the Jung- 
frau fill their pockets ; why should they give double 
measure when single will serve ? Even so solidly pic- 
turesque a town as Berne — a town full of massive 
Teutonic quaintness and sturdy individuality of feature 
— nowhere by a single happy accident of architecture 
even grazes the line of beauty. The place is so full of 
entertaining detail that the fancy warms to it, and you 
good-naturedly pronounce it charming. But when the 
sense of novelty subsides, and you notice the prosaic 
scoop of its arcades, the wanton angularity of its gro- 
tesque, umbrella - shaped roofs, the general plebeian 
stride and straddle of its architecture, you half take 
back your kindness, and declare that nature in Switzer- 
land might surely afford to be a trifle less jealous of art. 
But wherever the German tone of things prevails, a 
certain rich and delectable homeliness goes with it, and 
I have of Berne this pleasant recollection : the vision 
of a long main street, looking dark, somehow, in spite 
of its breadth, and bordered with houses supported on 
deep arcades, whereof the short, thick pillars resemble 
queerly a succession of bandy legs, and overshaded by 
high-piled pagoda roofs. The dusky arcades are lined 
with duskier shops and bustling with traffic ; the v/in- 
dows of the houses are open, and filled with charming 
flowers. They are invariably adorned, furthermore, 
with a bright red window-cushion, which in its turn 
sustains a fair Bernese, — a Bernese fair enough, at least, 
to complete the not especially delicate harmony of the 
turkey-red cushion and the vividly blooming plants. 
These deep color-spots, scattered along the gray stretch 



68 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

of the houses, help to make the scene a picture ; yet if 
it remains, somehow, at once so pleasant and so plain, 
you may almost find the explanation in the row of 
ancient fountains along the middle of the street, — the 
peculiar glory of Berne, — each a great stone basin 
with a pillar rising from the centre and supporting a 
sculptured figure more or less heraldic and legendary. 
This richly wrought chain of fountains is a precious 
civic possession, and has an admirably picturesque ef- 
fect ; but each of the images which presides at these 
sounding springs — sources of sylvan music in the an- 
cient street — appears, when you examine it, a mon- 
ster of awkwardness and ugliness. 

I ought to add that I write these lines in a place so 
charming that it seems pure perversity to remember 
here anything but the perfect beauty of Switzerland. 
From my window I look straight through the gray-blue 
portals of the Via Mala. Gray-blue they are with an 
element of melancholy red — like the rust on an an- 
cient sword ; and they rise in magnificent rocky crags 
on either side of this old-time evil way, in which the 
waning afternoon is deepening the shadows against a 
splendid background of sheer gray rock, muffled here 
and there in clinging acres of pine forest. The car- 
riage-road winds into it with an air of solemnity which 
suggests some almost metaphysical simile, — the ad- 
vance of a simple, credulous reader, say, into some 
darksome romance. If you think me fantastic, come 
and feel the influence of this lovely little town of Thu- 
sis. I may well be fantastic, however, for I have fresh 
in my memory a journey in which the fancy finds as 



I 



SWISS NOTES. 69 

good an account as in any you may treat it to in Swit- 
zerland, — a long two-days' drive through the western 
Orisons and the beautiful valley of the Vorder-Ehein. 
The scenery is, perhaps, less characteristically Swiss 
than that of many other regions, but it can hardly fail 
to deepen your admiration for a country which is able 
so liberally to overheap the measure of great impres- 
sions. It is a landscape rather of ruin-crowned cliff 
and crag, than of more or less virginal snow-peaks, but 
in its own gentler fashion it is as vast and bold and 
free as the Oberland. Coming down from the Oberalp 
which divides this valley from that of the St. Gothard, 
we entered a wondrous vista of graduated blue dis- 
tances, along which the interlapping mountain-spurs 
grew to seem like the pillars — if one can imagine re- 
clining pillars — of a mighty avenue. The landscape 
was more than picturesque, it w^as consummately pic- 
torial. I fancied that I had never seen in nature such a 
wealth of blue, — deep and rich in the large foreground, 
and splendidly contrasted with the slopes of ripening 
gTain, blocked out without hedge or fence in yellow 
parallelograms, and playing thence through shades of 
color, which were clear even in the vague distances. 
Foreground and distance here have alike a strong his- 
toric tinge. The little towns which yet subsist as 
almost formless agglomerations of rugged stone were 
members of the great Gray League of resistance to the 
baronial brigands whose crumbling towers and keeps 
still make the mountain-sides romantic. Tliese little 
towns, Ilanz in especial, and Dissentis, overstared by 
the great blank facade of its useless monastery, are 



70 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

hardly more than rather putrid masses of mouldy ma- 
sonry ; but with their desolate air of having been and 
ceased to be, their rugged solidity of structure, their 
low black archways, surmounted with stiffly hewn ar- 
morial shields, their lingering treasures in window- 
screen and gate of fantastically wrought-iron, they are 
among the things which make the sentimental tourist 
lean forth eagerly from his carriage with an impulse 
which may be called the prevision of retrospect. 



FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN. 



TOUE truly sentimental tourist can never houder 
long, and it was at Chambery — but four hours 
from Geneva — that I accepted the situation, and de- 
cided that there might be mysterious delights in enter- 
ing Italy whizzing through an eight-mile tunnel, like 
some highly improved projectile of the period. I found 
my reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets 
you betimes with something of a southern smile. If 
it is not as Italian as Italy, it is at least more Ital- 
ian than Switzerland, — more Italian, too, I should 
think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarm- 
ing red-legged soldiery who so ostentatiously assign it 
to the dominion of M. Thiers. The light and coloring 
had, to my eyes, not a little of that mollified depth 
which they had last observed in Italy. It was simply, 
perhaps, that the weather was hot and that the mountains 
were drowsing in that iridescent haze which I have 
seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the vegeta- 
tion, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and 
curl, and the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines 
left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. 
Chambery as a town, however, affords little premonition 



72 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

of Italy. There is shabbiness and shabbiness, the dis- 
criminating tourist will tell yon ; and that of the ancient 
capital of Savoy lacks color. I found a better pastime, 
however, than strolling through the dark, dull streets 
in quest of " effects " that were not forthcoming. The 
first urchin you meet will tell you the way to Les Char- 
mettes and the Maison Jean-Jacques. A very pleasant 
way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town, — a wind- 
ing, climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and 
sturdy hedge as to give it the air of an English lane, — 
if you can fancy an English lane introducing you to 
the haunts of a Madame de Warens 1 The house which 
formerly sheltered this lady's singular menage stands on 
a hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects 
with the little grass-grown terrace before it. It is a 
small, shabby, homely dwelling, with a certain reputa- 
ble solidity, however, and more of internal spaciousness 
than of outside promise. The place is shown by an 
elderly Frenchwoman, who points out the very few sur- 
viving objects which you may touch, with the reflec- 
tion — complacent in whatsoever degree suits you — 
that Eousseau's hand has often lain there. It was pre- 
sumably a meagrely appointed house, and I wondered 
that on these scanty features so much expression should 
linger. But the edifice has an ancient ponderosity of 
structure, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems 
to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old 
jpcqyiers a ramages on the walls, and to lodge in the 
crevices of the brown wooden ceilings. Madame de 
Warens's bed remains, with Eousseau's own narrow 
couch, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and 



FROM CHAMBfiRY TO MILAN. 73 

a battered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved 
with its master's name, — its primitive tick as extinct 
as his heart-beats. It cost me, I confess, a somewhat 
pitying acceleration of my own to see this intimately 
personal relic of the genius loci — for it had dwelt in 
his waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a ma- 
terial point in space nearer to a man's consciousness, 
— tossed so irreverently upon the table on which you 
deposited your fee, beside the dog's-eared visitors' 
record — the livre de cuisine recently denounced by 
Madame Sand. In fact, the place generally, in so far 
as some faint ghostly presence of its famous inmates 
seems to linger there, is by no means exhilarating. 
Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at least 
of prosperity and honor, wealth and success. But Les 
Charmettes is haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. 
The place tells of poverty, trouble, and impurity. A 
good deal of clever modern talent in France has been 
employed in touching up the episode of which it was 
the scene, and tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. 
But as I stood on the charming terrace I have men- 
tioned, — a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy flags 
and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great 
swelling violet hills, — stood there reminded how much 
sweeter Nature is than man, the story looked rather 
wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations, 
and I could muster no keener relish for it than is im- 
plied in perfect pity. Hero and heroine were first-rate 
subjects for psychology, but hardly for poetry. But, 
not to moralize too sternly for a tourist between trains, 
I should add that, as an illustration, to be inserted men- 

4 



74 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

tally in the text of the " Confessions/' a glimpse of Les 
Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare 
charm of good autobiography to behold with one's eyes 
the faded and battered background of the story ; and 
Rousseau's narrative is so incomparably vivid and for- 
cible, that the sordid little house at Chambery seems of 
a hardly deeper shade of reality than the images you 
contemplate in his pages. 

If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus 
helplessly with the past, I frankly recognized on the 
morrow that the Mont Cenis Tunnel savors strongly of 
the future. As I passed along the St. Gothard, a couple 
of months since, I perceived, half-way up the Swiss 
ascent, a group of navvies at work in a gorge beneath 
the road. They had laid bare a broad surface of gran- 
ite, and had punched in the centre of it a round, black 
cavity, of about the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of 
a soup-plate. This was the embryonic form of the dark 
mid-channel of the St. Gothard Eailway, which is to 
attain its perfect development some eight years hence. 
The Mont Cenis, therefore, may be held to have set a 
fashion which will be followed till the highest Him- 
alaya is but the ornamental apex or snow-capped gable- 
tip of some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tun- 
nel differs but in length from other tunnels ; you spend 
half an hour in it. But you come whizzing out of it 
into Transalpine Italy, and, as you look back, may 
fancy it shrugging its mighty shoulders over the track — 
a spasmodic protest of immobility against speed. The 
tunnel is certainly not a poetic object, but there is no 
perfection without its beauty ; and as you measure the 



FROM CHAMBl&RY TO MILAN. 75 

long rugged outline of the pyramid of which it forms 
the base, you must admit that it is the perfection of a 
short cut. Twenty-four hours from Paris to Turin is 
speed for the times — speed which may content us, at 
any rate, until expansive Berlin has succeeded in pla- 
cing itself at thirty-six from Milan. I entered Turin 
of a lovely August afternoon, and found a city of ar- 
cades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, 
blue-legged officers, and ladies draped in the Spanish 
veil. An old friend of Italy, coming back to her, finds 
an easy waking for sleeping memories. Every object 
is a reminder. Half an hour after my arrival, as I 
stood at my window, looking out on the great square, 
it seemed to me that the scene within and without was 
a rough epitome of every pleasure and every impression 
I had formerly gathered from Italy ; the balcony and 
the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, 
the lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the 
broad divan framed for the noonday siesta, the massive 
mediaeval Castello in mid-square, with its shabby rear 
and its pompous Palladian front, the brick campaniles 
beyond, the milder, yellower light, the brighter colors 
and softer sounds. Later, beneath the arcades, I found 
many an old acquaintance, beautiful of&cers, resplen- 
dent, slow-strolling, contemplative of female beauty ; 
civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less gorgeous, with 
that religious faith in their mustaches and shirt-fronts 
which distinguishes the telle jeunesse of Italy ; ladies 
most artfully veiled in lace mantillas, but with too little 
art — or too much nature, at least — in the reg^ion of 
the boddice ; well-conditioned young abhati, with neatly 



76 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

drawn stockiDgs. These, indeed, are not objects of 
first-rate interest, and with such Turin is rather mea- 
grely furnished. It has no architecture, no churches, 
no monuments, nor especially picturesque street-scen- 
ery. It has, indeed, the great votive temple of the Su- 
perga, which stands on a high hilltop above the city, 
gazing across at Monte Eosa, and lifting its own fine 
dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But 
when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside 
the Po, as shrivelled and yellow in August as some 
classic Spanish stream, and said to yourself that in 
architecture position is half the battle, you have noth- 
ing left to visit but the Museum of pictures. The 
Turin Gallery, which is large and well arranged, is the 
fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces ; a couple 
of magnificent Yandycks and a couple of Paul Vero- 
neses ; the latter a Queen of Sheba and a Feast at the 
House of Levi, — the usual splendid combioation of 
brocades, grandees, and marble colonnades dividing 
skies de turquoise malade, as Theophile Gautier says. 
The Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect 
the traveller feels at liberty to keep his best attention 
in reserve. If, however, he has the proper relish for 
Vandyck, let him linger long and fondly here ; for that 
admiration will never be more potently stirred than by 
the delicious picture of the three little royal highnesses, 
the sons and the daughter of Charles I. All the purity 
of childhood is here, and all its soft solidity of struc- 
ture, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin, and 
contrasted charmingly with its pompous rigidity. Clad 
respectively in crimson, white, and blue, the royal ba- 



FROM CHAMB]&RY TO MILAN. 77- 

bies stand up in their ruffs and fardingales in dimpled 
serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at the 
spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful gro- 
tesqueness, which make the picture as real as it is 
elegant. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly 
would think twice before pinching their cheeks, — pro- 
vocative as they are of this tribute of admiration, — 
and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off 
the ground, — the royal dais on w^hich they stand so 
sturdily planted by right of birth. There is something 
inimitable in the paternal gallantry with which the 
painter has touched off the young lady. She was a 
princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we 
may fancy, to work into his picture an intimation that 
she was a creature whom in her teens, the lucklessly 
smitten — even as he was prematurely — must vainly 
sigh for. Although the work is a masterpiece of ex- 
ecution, its merits under this head may be emulated — 
at a distance. The lovely modulations of color in the 
three contrasted and harmonized little satin petticoats — 
the solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their 
prettiness — the happy, unexaggerated squareness and 
maturity of pose — are, severally, points to study, to 
imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste of 
the picture is its great secret as well as its great merit — 
a taste which seems one of the lost instincts of man- 
kind. Go and enjoy this supreme expression of Van- 
dyck's fine sense, and admit that never was a politer 
work. 

Milan is an older, richer, more historic city than 
Turin ; but its general aspect is no more distinctly 



Y8 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

Italian. The long Austrian occupation, perhaps, did 
something to Germanize its physiognomy ; though, in- 
deed, this is an indifferent explanation when one re- 
members how well, picturesquely, Italy held her own in 
Venetia. Far be it from me, moreover, to accuse Milan 
of a want of picturesqueness. I mean simply that at 
certain points it seems rather like the last of the ]N"orth- 
ern capitals than the first of the Southern. The cathe- 
dral is before all things picturesque ; it is not interest- 
ing, it is not logical, it is not even, to some minds, 
commandingly beautiful; but it is grandly curious, 
superbly rich. I hope, for my own part, that I shall 
never grow too fastidious to enjoy it. If it had no 
other beauty it would have that of impressive, immeas- 
urable achievement. As I strolled beside its vast in- 
dented base one eveninc^ and felt it above me, massing 
its gray mysteries in the starlight, while the restless 
human tide on which I floated rose no higher than the 
first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted 
to believe that beauty in great architecture is almost a 
secondary merit, and that the main point is mass — 
such mass as may make it a supreme embodiment of 
sustained effort. Viewed in this way, a great building 
is the greatest conceivable work of art. More than any 
other it represents difficulties annulled, resources com- 
bined, labor, courage, and patience. And there are 
people who tell us that art has nothing to do with 
morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is con- 
cerned, ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan 
Cathedral within to represent carved stone-work. Of 
this famous roof every one has heard, — how good it is. 



FROM CHAMB^RY TO MILAN. 79 

how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent an 
artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you 
on entering the church. The discriminating tourist 
may accept it philosophically, I think ; for the interior, 
though admirably effective, has no very recondite beau- 
ties. It is splendidly vast and dim ; the altar-lamps 
twinkle afar through the incense-thickened air like fog- 
lights at sea, and the great columns rise straight to the 
roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth 
and altitude of oaks of a thousand years ; but there is 
little refinement of design — few of those felicities of 
proportion which the eye caresses, when it finds them, 
very much as the memory retains and repeats some 
happy line of poetry or some delightful musical phrase. 
But picturesque, I repeat, is the whole vast scene, and 
nothing more so than a certain exhibition which I pri- 
vately enjoyed of the relics of St. Charles Borromeus. 
This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but 
gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the pavement of 
the church, before the high altar ; and for the modest 
sum of five francs you may have his shrivelled mortal- 
ity unveiled, and gaze at it in all the dreadful double 
scepticism of a Protestant and a tourist. The Catholic 
Church, I believe, has some doctrine that its ends j ustify 
at need any means whatsoever ; a fortiori, therefore, 
nothing it does can be ridiculous. The performance in 
question, of which the good San Carlo paid the cost, 
was impressive, certainly, but as great grotesqueness is 
impressive. The little sacristan, having secured his 
audience, whipped on a white tunic over his frock, 
Hghted a couple of extra candles, and proceeded to re- 



80 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

move from above tlie altar, by means of a crank, a sort 
of sliding shutter, just as you may see a shop-boy do 
of a morning at his master's window. In this case, too, 
a large sheet of plate-glass was uncovered, and, to form 
an idea of the etalage, you must imagine that a jeweller, 
for reasons of his own, has struck an unnatural partner- 
ship with an undertaker. The black, mummified corpse 
of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his 
mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered, and gloved, 
and glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordi- 
nary mixture of death and life; the desiccated clay, 
the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, 
and the living, glowing, twinkling splendor of diamonds, 
emeralds, and sapphires. The collection is really fine, 
and various great historic names are attached to the 
different offerings. Whatever may be the better opin- 
ion as to whether the Church is in a decline, I cannot 
help thinking that she will make a tolerable figure in 
the world so long as she retains this great capital of 
bric-a-brac, scintillating throughout Christendom at 
effectively scattered points. You see, I am forced to 
agree after all, in spite of the sliding shutter and the 
profane exhibitory arts of the sacristan, that the majesty 
of the Church saved the situation, or made it, at least, 
sublimely ridiculous. Yet it was from a natural desire 
to breathe a sweeter air that I immediately afterwards 
undertook the interminable climb to the roof of the 
cathedral This is a great spectacle, and one of the 
best known ; for every square inch of wall on the wind- 
ing stairways is bescribbled with a traveller's name. 
There is a great glare from the far-stretching slopes of 



FROM CHAMB^RY TO MILAN. 81 

marble, a confusion (like the masts of a navy or the 
spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting 
the impalpable blue, and, better than either, a delicious 
view of level Lombardy, sleeping in its rich Transalpine 
light, and looking, with its white-walled dwellings, and 
the spires on its horizon, like a vast green sea spotted 
with ships. After two months of Switzerland, the 
Lombard plain is a delicious rest to the eye, and the 
yellow, liquid, free-flowing light (as if on favored Italy 
the vessels of heaven were more widely opened) had 
for mine a charm which made me think of a great 
opaque mountain as a blasphemous invasion of the 
atmospheric spaces. 

I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime 
treasure of Milan at the present hour is the beautiful, 
tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is good for another 
thousand years, but I doubt whether our children will 
find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescos 
much more than the shadow of a shadow. Its fame for 
many years now has been that, as one may say, of an 
illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he 
lasts, with death-bed speeches. The picture needs not 
another scar or stain, now, to be the saddest work of 
art in the world ; and battered, defaced, ruined as it is, 
it remains one of the greatest. It is really not amiss 
to compare its decay to the slow extinction of a human 
organism. The creation of the picture was a breath 
from the infinite, and the painter's conception not im- 
measurably less complex than that implied, say, by his 
own composition. There has been much talk lately 
about the irony of fate, but I suspect that fate was 



4* 



82 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

never more ironical than when she led this most deeply 
calculating of artists to spend fifteen long years in 
building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, 
after all, can I fancy this apparent irony but a deeper 
wisdom, for if the picture enjoyed the immortal health 
and bloom of a first-rate Titian we should have lost 
one of the most pertinent lessons in the history of art. 
We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain proof, that 
there is no limit to the amount of substance an artist 
may put into his w^ork. Every painter ought once in 
his life to stand before the Cenacolo and decipher its 
moral. Pour everything you mentally possess into your 
picture, lest perchance your " prepared surface " should 
play you a trick ! Eaphael was a happier genius ; you 
cannot look at his lovely Marriage of the Yirgin at the 
Brera, beautiful as some first deep smile of conscious 
inspiration, without feeling that he foresaw no com- 
plaint against fate, and that he looked at the world 
with the vision of a graceful optimist. But I have left 
no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise of 
bookworms with an eye for the picturesque — if such 
creatures exist — the Ambrosian Library ; nor of that 
solid old basilica of St. Ambrose, with its spacious 
atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in which it is 
surely your own fault if you do not forget Dr. Strauss 
and M. Kenan and worship as simply as a Christian of 
the ninth century. 

It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis 
road that, unlike those fine, old unimproved passes, the 
Simplon, the Spliigen, and — yet awhile longer — the 
St. Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise 



FEOM CHAMB^RY TO MILAN. 83 

adorned by the four lakes, as that of uncommented 
Scripture by the rivers of Eden. I made, however, 
an excursion to the Lake of Como, which, though brief, 
lasted long enough to make me feel as if I too were a 
hero of romance, with leisure for a love-affair, and not 
a hurrying tourist, with a Bradshaw in his pocket. The 
Lake of Como has figured largely in novels with a ten- 
dency to immorality — being commonly the spot to 
which inflammatory young gentlemen invite the wives 
of other gentlemen to fly with them and ignore the 
restrictions of public opinion. But here is a chance 
for the stern moralist to rejoice; the Lake of Como, 
too, has been improved, and can boast of a public 
opinion. I should pay a poor compliment, at least, to 
the swarming inmates of the hotels which now alter- 
nate, attractively, by the w^ater-side, with villas old and 
new, to think that it could not. But if it is lost to 
wicked novels, the unsophisticated American tourist 
may still do a little private romancing there. The 
pretty hotel at Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, the 
romance of what we call at home summer board. It 
is all so unreal, so fictitious, so eleojant and idle, so 
framed to undermine a rigid sense of the chief end of 
man not being to float forever in an ornamental boat, 
beneath an awning tasselled like a circus-horse, im- 
pelled by an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one 
stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to another, that 
departure seems as harsh and unnatural as the dream- 
dispelling note of some punctual voice at your bedside 
on a dusky winter morning. Yet I wondered, for my 
own part, where I had seen it all before — the pink- 



84 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of 
orange and oleander, the mountains shimmering in the 
hazy light like so many breasts of doves, the constant 
presence of the melodious Italian voice. Where, in- 
deed, but at the Opera, when the manager has been 
more than usually regardless of expense ? Here, in 
the foreground, was the palace of the nefarious bary- 
tone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on the 
stage as a railway buffet on the platform ; beyond, the 
delightful back scene, with its operatic gamut of color- 
ing; in the middle, the scarlet-sashed harcaiuoli, grouped 
like a chorus, hat in hand, awaiting the conductor's sig- 
nal. It was better even than being in a novel, — this 
being in a libretto. 



FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 

THEEE would be much to say about that golden 
chain of historic cities which stretches from Milan 
to Venice, in which the very names — Brescia, Verona, 
Mantua, Padua — are an ornament to one's phrase ; but 
I should have to draw upon recollections now three 
years old, and to make my short story a long one. Of 
Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, and 
even to these I must do hasty justice. I came into 
Venice, just as I had done before, toward the end of 
a summer's day, when the shadows begin to lengthen, 
and the light to glow, and found that the attendant 
sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was 
the same last intolerable delay at Mestre, just before 
your first, glimpse of the lagoon confirms the already 
distinct sea-smell which has added speed to the precur- 
sive flight of your imagination ; then the liquid level, 
edged far off by its band of undiscriminated domes and 
spires, soon distinguished and proclaimed, however, as 
excited and contentious heads multiply at the windows 
of the train ; then your long rumble on the immense 
white railway bridge, which, in spite of the invidious 
contrast drawn (very properly) by Mr. Euskin, between 



86 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

the old and the new approach to Venice, does truly, in 
a manner, shine across the green lap of the lagoon like 
a mighty causeway of marble ; then the plunge into the 
station, which would be exactly similar to every other 
plunge, save for one little fact, — that the key-note of 
the great medley of voices borne back from the exit is 
not " Cab, sir ! " but " Barca, signore ! " I do not mean, 
however, to follow the traveller through every phase 
of his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice 
beyond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature; 
though, for my own part, I hold that, to a fine, healthy 
appetite for the picturesque, the subject cannot be too 
diffusely treated. Meeting on the Piazza, on the even- 
ing of my arrival, a young American painter, who told 
me that he had been spending the summer at Venice, 
I could have assaulted him, for very envy. He was 
painting, forsooth, the interior of St. Marks ! To be 
a young American painter, unperplexed by the mocking, 
elusive soul of things, and satisfied with their whole- 
some, light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; 
fond of color, of sea and sky, and anything that may 
chance between them ; of old lace, and old brocade, and 
old furniture (even when made to order) ; of time-mel- 
lowed harmonies on nameless canvases, and happy con- 
tours in cheap old engravings ; to spend one's mornings 
in still, productive analysis of the clustered shadows 
of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere, in church 
or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in 
starlight gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb 
languidly between the two great pillars of the Piaz- 
zetta and over the low, black domes of the church, — 



FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 87 

this, I consider, is to be as happy as one may safely 
be. 

The mere use of one's eyes, in Venice, is happiness 
enough, and generous observers find it hard to keep an 
account of their profits in this line. Everything the 
eye rests on is effective, pictorial, harmonious — thanks 
to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your 
brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting him- 
self in the light, seems to you, as you lie staring be- 
neath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian 
" effect." The light here is, in fact, a mighty magician, 
and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret, 
the greatest artist of them all. You should see, in 
places, the material on which it works — slimy brick, 
marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea 
and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones 
into a kind of soft iridescence, a lustrous compound 
of wave and cloud, and a hundred nameless local re- 
flections, and then to fling the clear tissue against 
every object of vision. You may see these elements 
at work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity 
you should choose the finest day in the month, and 
have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to Tor- 
cello. Without making this excursion, you can hardly 
pretend to know Venice, or to sympathize with that 
longing for pure radiance which animated her great 
colorists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I could not 
get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper 
atmosphere on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello 
there is nothing but the light to see — nothing, at least, 
but a sort of blooming sand-bar, intersected by a single 



88 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

narrow creek which does duty as a canal, and occupied 
by a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings, apparently, 
of market-gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous 
church of the eleventh century. It is impossible to 
imagine a more poignant embodiment of unheeded 
decease. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and 
it lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a 
group of weather-bleached parental bones left impiously 
unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the 
shallow inlet, and walked along the grass beside a 
hedge to the low-browed, crumbling cathedral. The 
charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, over- 
frowned by masses of brickwork honeycombed by the 
suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce, 
once for all, the attempt to express ; but you may be 
sure, whenever I mention such a spot, that it is some- 
thing delicious. A delicious stillness covered the little 
campo at Torcello ; I remember none so audible save 
that of the Eoman Campagna. There was no life there 
but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries 
of half a dozen young children, who dogged our steps 
and clamored for coppers. These children, by the way, 
were the handsomest little brats in the world, and each 
was furnished with a pair of eyes which seemed a sort 
of protest of nature against the stinginess of fortune. 
They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their 
little bellies protruded like those of infant Abyssinians 
in the illustrations of books of travel; but as they 
scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grin- 
ning like suddenly translated cherubs, and showing 
their hungry little teeth, they suggested forcibly that 



FROM VENICE TO STRASBUEG. 89 

the best assurance of happiness in this world is to be 
found in the maximum of innocence and the minimum 
of wealth. One small urchin — framed, if ever a child 
was, to be the joy of an aristocratic mamma — was the 
most expressively beautiful little mortal I ever looked 
upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his 
grave ; and yet here he was, running wild among these 
sea-stunted bushes, on the lonely margin of a decaying 
world, in prelude to how blank, or to how dark, a des- 
tiny? Verily, nature is still at odds with fortune; 
though, indeed, if they ever really pull together, I am 
afraid nature will lose her picturesqueness. An infant 
citizen of our own republic, straight-haired, pale- eyed, 
and freckled, duly darned and catechised, marching into 
a New England school-house, is an object often seen 
and soon forgotten ; but I think I shall always remem- 
ber, with infinite tender conjecture, as the years roll by, 
this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet 
all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for 
the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathedral 
was shaking with an ague, and his melancholy presence 
seemed to point the moral of forsaken nave and choir. 
The church is admirably primitive and curious, and 
reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of 
Eome — St. Clement and St. Agnes. The interior is 
rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth century, 
and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pave- 
ment is not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But the 
terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their dead 
gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting 
arms — intensely personal sentinels of a personal De- 



90 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

ity. Their stony stare seems to wait forever vainly for 
some visible revival of primitive orthodoxy, and one 
may well wonder whether it finds much beguilement 
in idly gazing troops of Western heretics — passionless 
even in their heresy. 

I had been curious to see whether, in the galleries 
and churches of Venice, I should be disposed to trans- 
pose my old estimates — to burn what I had adored, 
and to adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that 
one can stand in the Ducal Palace for the first time 
but once, with the deliciously ponderous sense of that 
particular half -hour being an era in one's mental his- 
tory ; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least — a 
great comfort in a short stay — that none of my early 
memories were likely to change places, and that I could 
take up my admirations where I had left them. I still 
found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian 
supremely beautiful, and Tintoret altogether unqualifi- 
able. I repaired immediately to the little church of 
San Cassano, which contains the smaller of Tintoret's 
two great Crucifixions ; and when I had looked at it 
awhile, I drew a long breath, and felt that I could con- 
template any other picture in Venice with proper self- 
possession. It seemed to me that I had advanced to 
the uttermost limit of painting ; that beyond this an- 
other art — inspired poetry — begins, and that Bellini, 
Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, all joining hands and 
straining every muscle of their genius, reach forward 
not so far but that they leave a visible space in which 
Tintoret alone is master. I well remember' the excite- 
ment into which he plunged me, when I first learned 



FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 91 

to know him; but the glow of that comparatively 
youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, that 
confident vivacity of phrase, of which, in trying to utter 
my impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the 
impotence. In his power there are many weak spots, 
mysterious lapses, and fitful intermissions ; but, when 
the list of his faults is complete, he still seems to me to 
remain the most interesting of painters. His reputation 
rests chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit — his 
energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his being, as 
Theophile Gautier says, le roi des fongueux. These 
qualities are immense, but the great source of his im- 
pressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew 
a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No 
painter ever had such breadth and such depth; and 
even Titian, beside him, has often seemed to me but a 
great decorative artist. Mr. Euskin, whose eloquence, 
in dealing^ with the great Venetians, sometimes outruns 
his discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as 
a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it seems 
to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of the 
" Eape of Europa " is, pictorially speaking, no greater 
casuist than any other genius of supreme good taste. 
Titian was, assuredly, a mighty poet, but Tintoret — 
Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest 
works you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old 
doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the 
conflict between idealism and realism dies the most 
natural of deaths. In Tintoret, the problem is practi- 
cally solved, and the alternatives so harmoniously in- 
terfused that I defy the keenest critic to say where one 



92 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

begins and the other ends. The homeliest prose melts 
into the most ethereal poetry, and the literal and imagi- 
native fairly confound their identity. This, however, 
is vague praise. Tintoret's great merit, to my mind, 
was his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once 
he had conceived the germ of a scene, it defined itself 
to his imagination with an intensity, an amplitude, an 
individuality of expression, which make one's observa- 
tion of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind 
than a kind of supplementary experience of life. Ver- 
onese and Titian are content with a much looser speci- 
fication, as their treatment of any subject which Tinto- 
ret has also treated abundantly proves. There are few 
more suggestive contrasts than that between the ab- 
sence of a total character at all commensurate with its 
scattered variety and brilliancy, in Veronese's "Mar- 
riage of Cana," in the Louvre, and the poignant, almost 
startling, completeness of Tintoret's illustration of the 
theme at the Salute Church. To compare his " Presen- 
tation of the Virgin," at the Madonna dell' Orto, with 
Titian's at the Academy, or his " Annunciation " with 
Titian's, close at hand, is to measure the essential differ- 
ence between observation and imagination. One has 
certainly not said all that there is to say for Titian 
when one has called him an observer. // y mettait du 
sien, as the French say, and I use the term to designate 
roughly the artist whose apprehension, infinitely deep 
and strong when applied to the single figure or to 
easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dra- 
matic combinations — or, rather, leaves them ungauged. 
It was the whole scene that Tintoret seemed to have 



FEOM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 93 

beheld, in a flash of inspiration intense enough to 
stamp it ineffaceably on his perception ; and it was 
the whole scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unpre- 
cedented, which he committed to canvas with all the 
vehemence of his talent. Compare his " Last Supper," 
at San Giorgio, — its long, diagonally placed table, its 
dusky spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo- 
light, its startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realis- 
tic foreground, — with the usual formal, almost mathe- 
matical, rendering of the subject, in which impressive- 
ness seems to have been sought in elimination rather 
than comprehension. You get from Tintoret's work 
the impression that he felt, pictorially, the great, beau- 
tiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as 
Shakespeare felt it poetically — with a heart that never 
ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every 
stroke of his brush. Thanks to this fact, his works are 
signally grave, and their almost universal and rapidly 
increasing decay does not relieve their gloom. ^N'oth- 
iDg, indeed, can well be sadder than the great collec- 
tion of Tintorets at San Eocco. Incurable blackness 
is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at 
you across the sombre splendor of their great chambers 
like gaunt, twilight phantoms of pictures. To our 
children's children, Tintoret, as things are going, can 
be hardly more than a name ; and such of them as 
shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed and 
stained, of the great "Bearing of the Cross," at San 
Eocco, will live and die without knowing the largest 
eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of 
solemnity to the place, recall, as vividly as possible, 



94 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

while you linger at San Eocco, the painter's singularly- 
interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The old 
man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as 
sad as a sunless twilight, with just such a stoical hope- 
lessness as you might fancy him to wear, if he stood at 
your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It was not 
whimsical to fancy it the face of a man who felt that 
he had given the world more than the world was likely 
to repay. Indeed, before every picture of Tintoret, you 
may remember this tremendous portrait with profit. 
On one side, the power, the passion, the illusion of his 
art ; on the other, the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The 
world's knowledge of Tintoret is so small that the 
portrait throws a doubly precious light on his person- 
ality ; and when we wonder vainly what manner of 
man he was, and what were his purpose, his faith, and 
his method, we may find forcible assurance there that 
they were, at any rate, his life — and a very intense 
one. 

Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, 
is, under any circumstances, a delightfully interesting 
city ; but the kindness of my own memory of it is 
deepened by a subsequent ten days' experience of Ger- 
many. I rose one morning at Verona, and went to bed 
at night at Botzen ! The statement needs no comment, 
and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are as 
painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared 
myself for your delectation with a copious tirade on 
German manners, German scenery, German art, and the 
German stage — on the lights and shadows of Inns- 
briick, Munich, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg ; but just 



FROM VENICE TO STRASBUEG. 95 

as I was about to put pen to paper, I glanced into a 
little volume on these very topics, lately published by 
that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Fey- 
deau, the fruit of a summer's observation at Homburg. 
This work produced a reaction ; and if I chose to follow 
M. Feydeau's own example when he wishes to qualify 
his approbation, I might call his treatise by any vile 
name known to the speech of man, but I content my- 
self with pronouncing it — superficial. I then reflect 
that my own opportunities for seeing and judging were 
extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some 
more enlightened critic should come and pronounce me 
superficial. Its sum and substance was to have been 
that — superficially — Germany is ugly ; that Munich 
is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite 
of its charming castle) and even Nuremberg not a joy 
forever. But comparisons are odious ; and if Munich 
is ugly, Verona is beautiful enough. You may laugh 
at my logic, but you will probably assent to my mean- 
ing. I carried away from Verona a certain mental pic- 
ture upon which I cast an introspective glance when- 
ever between Botzen and Strasburg the oppression of 
external circumstance became painful. It was a lovely 
August afternoon in the Eoman arena — a ruin in 
which repair and restoration have been so gradually 
and discreetly practised that it seems all of one harmo- 
nious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high against 
the sky in a single, clear, continuous line, broken here 
and there only by strolling and reclining loungers. 
The massive tiers inclined in solid monotony to the 
central circle, in which a small open-air theatre was in 
active operation. A small section of the great slope of 



96 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

masonry facing the stage was roped off into an andito- 
rinm, in which the narrow level space between the 
foot-lights and the lowest step figured as the pit. Foot- 
lights are a figure of speech, for the performance was 
going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with a 
delightful, and apparently by no means misplaced, 
confidence in the good-will of the spectators. What 
the piece was that was deemed so superbly able to 
shift for itself I know not — very possibly the same 
drama that I remember seeing advertised during my 
former visit to Yerona ; nothing less than La Tremenda 
Ginstizia di Bio. If titles are worth anything, this 
product of the melodramatist's art might surely stand 
upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little 
group of regular spectators was gathered a sort of free- 
list of unauthorized observers, who, although beyond 
ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous 
breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread 
of the piece. It was all deliciously Italian — the mix- 
ture of old life and new, the mountebank's booth (it 
was hardly more) grafted upon the antique circus, the 
dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loun- 
gers and idlers beneath the kindly sky, upon the sun- 
warmed stones. I never felt more keenly the difference 
between the background to life in the Old World and 
the New. There are other things in Verona to make it 
a liberal education to be born there, though that it is 
one for the contemporary Veronese I do not pretend to 
say. The Tombs of the Scaligers, with their soaring 
pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, their exquisite 
refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I can- 
not profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have 



FROM VENICE TO STRASBURG. 97 

fully comprehended and enjoyed. They seemed to me 
full of deep architectural meanings, such as must drop 
gently into the mind one by one, after infinite tranquil 
contemplation. But even to the hurried and preoccu- 
pied traveller the solemn little chapel-yard in the city's 
heart, in which they stand girdled by their great sway- 
ing curtain of linked and twisted iron, is one of the 
most impressive spots in Italy. ]N"owhere else is such 
a wealth of artistic achievement crowded into so nar- 
row a space ; nowhere else are the daily comings and 
goings of men blessed by the presence of manlier art. 
Yerona is rich, furthermore, in beautiful churches — 
several with beautiful names : San Fermo, Santa Ana- 
stasia, San Zenone. This last is a structure of high an- 
tiquity, and of the most impressive loveliness. The nave 
terminates in a double choir, that is, a sub-choir or 
crypt, into which you descend, and wander among prim- 
itive columns whose variously grotesque capitals rise 
hardly higher than your head, and an upper choral level 
into which you mount by broad stairways of the most 
picturesque effect. I shall never forget the impression 
of majestic chastity that I received from the great nave 
of the building on my former visit. I decided to my 
satisfaction then that every church is from the devo- 
tional point of view a solecism, that has not something 
of a similar absolute felicity of proportion ; for strictly 
formal beauty seems best to express our conception of 
spiritual beauty. The nobly serious effect of San Ze- 
none is deepened by its single picture — a masterpiece 
of the most serious of painters, the severe and exqui- 
site Mantegna. 



THE PARISIAN STAGE. 

Paris, December, 1872. 

IT is impossible to spend many weeks in Paris with- 
out observing that the theatre plays a very impor- 
tant part in French civilization ; and it is impossible 
to go much to the theatre without finding it a copious 
source of instruction as to French ideas, manners, and 
philosophy. I supposed that I had a certain acquaint- 
ance with these complex phenomena, but during the 
last couple of months I have occupied a great many 
orchestra chairs, and in the merciless glare of the foot- 
lights I have read a great many of my old convictions 
with a new distinctness. I have had at the same time 
one of the greatest attainable pleasures; for, surely, 
among the pleasures that one deliberately seeks and 
pays for, none beguiles the heavy human consciousness 
so totally as a first-rate evening at the Theatre Franc^ais 
or the Gymnase. It was the poet Gray, I believe, who 
said that his idea of heaven was to lie all day on a sofa 
and read novels. He, poor man, spoke while " Clarissa 
Harlowe " was still the fashion, and a novel was synon- 
ymous with an eternity. A much better heaven, I 
think, would be to sit all night in a fauteuil (if they 
were only a little better stuffed) listening to Delaunay, 



THE PARISIAN STAGE. 99 

watching Got, or falling in love with Mademoiselle 
Desclee. An acted play is a novel intensified ; it real- 
izes what the novel suggests, and, by paying a liberal 
tribute to the senses, anticipates your possible com- 
plaint that your entertainment is of the meagre sort 
styled " intellectual." The stage throws into relief the 
best gifts of the French mind, and the Theatre Franc^ais 
is not only the most amiable but the most character- 
istic of French institutions. I often think of the in- 
evitable first sensations there of the "cultivated for- 
eigner," let him be as stuffed with hostile prejudice as 
you please. He leaves the theatre an ardent Gallo- 
maniac. This, he cries, is the civilized nation ^jar ex- 
cellence. Such art, such finish, such grace, such taste, 
such a marvellous exhibition of applied science, are the 
mark of a chosen people, and these delightful talents 
imply the existence of every virtue. His enthusiasm 
may be short and make few converts ; but certainly 
during his stay in Paris, whatever may be his mind in 
the intervals, he never listens to the traditional toe — 
toe — toe which sounds up the curtain in the Eue Eiche- 
lieu, without murmuring, as he squares himself in his 
chair and grasps his lorgnette, that, after all, the French 
are prodigiously great ! 

I shall never forget a certain evening in the early 
summer when, after a busy, dusty, weary day in the 
streets, staring at charred ruins and finding in all things 
a vague aftertaste of gunpowder, I repaired to the The- 
atre Frangais to listen to Moliere's " Mariage Force " 
and Alfred de Musset's "II ne Faut Jurer de Eien." 
The entertainment seemed to my travel-tired brain 
L.oFC. 



100 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

what a perfumed batli is to one's weary limbs, and I 
sat in a sort of languid ecstasy of contemplation and 
wonder — wonder that the tender flower of poetry and 
art should bloom again so bravely over blood-stained 
pavements and fresh-made graves. Moliere is played 
at the Theatre Franqais as he deserves to be — one can 
hardly say more — with the most ungrudging breadth, 
exuberance, and entrain, and yet with a kind of aca- 
demic harmony and solemnity. Moliere, if he ever 
drops a kindly glance on MM. Got and Coquelin, must 
be the happiest of the immortals. To be read two 
hundred years after your death is something ; but to be 
acted is better, at least when your name does not hap- 
pen to be Shakespeare and your interpreter the great 
American (or, indeed, the great British) tragedian. Such 
powerful, natural, wholesome comedy as that of the 
creator of Sganarelle certainly never was conceived, 
and the actors I have just named give it its utmost 
force. I have often wondered that, in the keen and 
lucid atmosphere which Moliere casts about him, some 
of the effusions of his modern successors should live 
for an hour. Alfred de Musset, however, need fear no 
neighborhood, and his " II ne Faut Jurer," after Moliere's 
tremendous farce, was like fine sherry after strong ale. 
Got plays in it a small part, which he makes a great 
one, and Delaunay, the silver-tongued, the ever-young, 
and that plain robust person and admirable artist, Ma- 
dame Nathalie, and that divinely ingenuous ingenue, 
Mademoiselle Eeichemberg. It would be a poor com- 
pliment to the performance to say that it might have 
been mistaken for real life. If real life were a tithe as 



THE PAKISTAN STAGE. 101 

charming it would be a merry world. De Musset's 
plays, which, in general, were not written for the stage, 
are of so ethereal a quality that they lose more than 
they gain by the interpretation, refined and sympathetic 
as it is, which they receive at the Theatre Franc^ais. 
The most artistic acting is coarser than the poet's in- 
tention. 

The play in question, however, is an exception and 
keeps its silvery tone even in the glare of the foot-lights. 
The second act, at the rising of the curtain, represents 
a drawing-room in the country ; a stout, eccentric ba- 
ronne sits with her tapestry, making distracted small 
talk while she counts her points with a deliciously 
rustic abbe ; on the other side, her daughter, in white 
muslin and blue ribbons, is primly taking her dancing- 
lesson from a venerable choregraphic pedagogue in a 
wig and tights. The exquisite art with which, for the 
following ten minutes, the tone of random accidental 
conversation is preserved, while the baronne loses her 
glasses and miscounts her stitches, and the daughter 
recommences her step for the thirtieth time, must sim- 
ply, as the saying is, be seen to be appreciated. The 
acting is full of charming detail — detail of a kind we 
not only do not find, but do not even look for, on the 
English stage. The way in' which, in a subsequent 
scene, the young girl, listening at evening in the park 
to the passionate whisperings of the hero, drops her 
arms half awkwardly along her sides in fascinated self- 
surrender, is a touch quite foreign to English invention. 
Unhappily for us as actors, we are not a gesticulating 
people. Mademoiselle Eeichemberg's movement here 



102 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

is an intonation in gesture as eloquent as if she had 
spoken it. The incomparable Got has but a dozen 
short speeches to make, but he distils them with magi- 
cal neatness. He sits down to piquet with the baronne. 
"You risk nothing, M. I'Abb^ ? " she soon demands. The 
concentrated timorous prudence of the abbe's " Oh ! 
non ! " is a master-stroke ; it depicts a lifetime. Where 
Delaunay plays, however, it is hard not to call him the 
first. To say that he satisfies may at first seem small 
praise ; but it may content us when we remember what 
a very loose fit in the poet's vision is the usual jeune 
premier of the sentimental drama. He has at best a 
vast deal of fustian to utter, and he has a perilous bal- 
ance to preserve between the degree of romantic expres- 
sion expected in a gentleman whose trade is love-making 
and the degree tolerated in a gentleman who wears a 
better or worse made black coat and carries the hat of 
the period. Delaunay is fifty years old, and his person 
and physiognomy are meagre ; but his taste is so uner- 
ring, his touch so light and true, his careless grace so 
free and so elegant, that in his hands the jeune premier 
becomes a creation as fresh and natural as the unfolding 
rose. He has a voice of extraordinary sweetness and 
flexibility, and a delivery which makes the commonest 
phrases musical ; and when as Valentin, as Perdican, or 
as Fortunio, he embarks on one of De Musset's melo- 
dious tirades, and his utterance melts and swells in 
trembling cadence and ringing emphasis, there is really 
little to choose between the performance, as a mere 
vocal exhibition, and an aria by a first-rate tenor. 
An actor equally noted for his elegance, now attested 



THE PARISIAN STAGE. 103 

by forty years of triumphs, is Bressant, whose name, 
with old Parisians, is a synonyme for la distinction. 
"Distingue comme Bressant" is an accepted formula, 
of praise. A few years ago comedians were denied 
Christian burial; such are the revenges of history. 
Bressant's gentility is certainly a remarkable piece of 
art, but he always seems to me too conscious that an 
immense supply of the commodity is expected from 
him. Nevertheless, the Theatre Franqais offers nothing 
more effective and suggestive than certain little com- 
edies (the "Post Scriptum," for instance, by Emile 
Augier), in which he receives the replique from that 
venerable grande coquette, Madame Plessy, the direct 
successor, in certain parts, of Mademoiselle Mars. I 
find these illustrious veterans, on such occasions, more 
interesting even than they aspire to be, and the really 
picturesque figures are not the Comte nor the Marquise, 
but the grim and battered old comedians, with a life's 
length of foot-lights making strange shadows on their 
impenetrable masks. As a really august exhibition of 
experience, I recommend a tete-a-tete between these 
artists. The orchestra of the Theatre Fran^ais is 
haunted by a number of old gentlemen, classic play- 
goers, who look as if they took snuff from boxes adorned 
with portraits of the fashionable beauty of 1820. I 
caught an echo of my impressions from one of them 
the other evening, when, as the curtain fell on Bressant 
and Plessy, he murmured ecstatically to his neighbor, 
" Quelle connaissance de la scene . . . et de la vie ! " 

The audience at the Parisian theatres is indeed often 
as interesting to me as the play. It is, of course, com- 



104 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

posed of heterogeneous elements. There are a great 
many ladies with red wigs in the boxes, and a great 
many bald young gentlemen staring at them from the 
orchestra. But Us honnetes gens of every class are 
largely represented, and it is clear that even people of 
serious tastes look upon the theatre, not as one of the 
" extras," but as one of the necessities of life ; a period- 
ical necessity hardly less frequent and urgent than 
their evening paper and their demi-tasse. I am always 
struck with the number of elderly men, decorated, griz- 
zled, and grave, for whom the stage has kept its myste- 
ries. You may see them at the Palais Koyal, hstening 
complacently to the carnival of lewdness nightly enacted 
there, and at the Varieties, levelling their glasses pater- 
nally at the lightly clad heroines of Offenbach. The 
truth is, that in the theatre the French mind se recon- 
nait, according to its own idiom, more vividly than 
elsewhere. Its supreme faculty, the art of form, of 
arrangement and presentation, is j^re-eminently effective 
on the stage, and I suppose many a good citizen has 
before this consoled himself for his country's woes by 
reflecting that if the Germans have a Gravelotte in their 
records, they have not a " Eabagas," and if they possess 
a Bismarck and a Moltke, they have neither a Dumas 
nor a Schneider. A good French play is an admirable 
work of art, of which it behooves patrons of the con- 
temporary English drama, at any rate, to speak with 
respect. It serves its purpose to perfection, and French 
dramatists, as far as I can see, have no more secrets to 
learn. The first half-dozen a foreign spectator listens 
to seem to him among the choicest productions of the 



THE PAKISIAN STAGE. 105 

human mind, and it is only little by little that he 
becomes conscious of the extraordinary meagreness of 
their material. The substance of the plays I have 
lately seen seems to me, when I think them over, 
something really amazing, and it is what I had chiefly 
in mind in speaking just now of the stage as an index 
of social character. Prime material was evidently long 
asro exhausted, and the best that can be done now is to 
rearrange old situations with a kind of desperate inge- 
nuity. The field looks terribly narrow, but it is still 
cleverly worked. " An old theme, — but with a differ- 
ence," the workman claims ; and he makes the most of 
his difference — for laughter, if he is an amuseur pure 
and simple ; for tears, if he is a moralist. 

Do not for a moment imagine that moralists are 
wanting. Alexandre Dumas is one — he is a dozen, 
indeed, in his single self. M. Pailleron (whose " He- 
lene" is the last novelty at the Theatre Frangais) is 
another ; and I am not sure that, since " Eabagas," M. 
Sardou is not a third. The great dogma of M. Dumas 
is, that if your wife is persistently unfaithful to you, 
you must kill her. He leaves you, I suppose, the 
choice of weapons ; but that the thing must somehow 
be done, he has written a famous pamphlet, now reach- 
ing its fortieth edition, to prove. M. Pailleron holds, 
on the other hand, that if it was before your marriage, 
and before she had ever heard of you, and with her 
cousin, when she was a child and knew no better, you 
must — after terrific vituperation, indeed, and imminent 
suicide on the lady's part — press her relentingly to 
your bosom. M. Pailleron enforces this moral in cap- 

5* 



106 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

itally turned verse, and with Delannay's magical aid ; 
but as I sat through his piece the other evening, I 
racked my brain to discover wliat heinous offence Del- 
icacy has ever committed that she should have to do 
such cruel penance. I am afraid that she has worse 
things in store for her, for the event of the winter (if a 
cou;p d'etat does "not carry off the honors) is to be the 
new play of Dumas, " La Femme de Claude." What- 
ever becomes of the state, I shall go earl}^ to see the 
play, for it is to have the services of the first actress in 
the world. I have not the smallest hesitation in so 
qualifying Mademoiselle Desclee. She has just been 
sustaining by her sole strength the weight of a ponder- 
ous drama called " La Gueule du Loup," in which her 
acting seemed to me a revelation of the capacity of the 
art. I have never seen nature grasped so in its essence, 
and rendered with a more amazing mastery of the fine 
shades of expression. Just as the light drama in France 
is a tissue of fantastic indecencies, the serious drama is 
an agglomeration of horrors. I had supped so full of 
these that, before seeing the " Gueule du Loup," I had 
quite made up my mind to regard as an offence against 
civilization every new piece, whether light or serious, 
of which the main idea should not be pleasing. To do 
anything so pleasant as to please is the last thing that 
M. Dumas and his school think of. But Mademoiselle 
Desclee renders the chief situation of M. Laya's drama 
— that of a woman who has fancied herself not as other 
women are, coming to her senses at the bottom of a 
moral abyss, and measuring the length of her fall — 
with a verity so penetrating that I could not but ask 



THE PAEISIAN STAGE. 107 

myself whether, to become a wholesome and grateful 
spectacle, even the ugliest possibilities of life need any- 
thing more than rigorous exactness of presentation. 
Mademoiselle Desclee, at any rate, was for half an hour 
the most powerful of moralists. M. Laya, her author, 
on the other hand, is an atrocious one. His trivial 
denouement, treading on the heels of the sombre episode 
I have mentioned, is an insult to the spectator's sym- 
pathies. Even Mademoiselle Desclee's acting fails to 
give it dignity. Here, as everywhere, an inexpressible 
want of moral intelligence is the striking point. Novel 
and drama alike betray an incredibly superficial per- 
ception of the moral side of life. It is not only that 
adultery is their only theme, but that the treatment of 
it is so singularly vicious and arid. It has been used 
now for so many years as a mere pigment, a source of 
dramatic color, a ficelle, as they say, that it has ceased 
to have any apparent moral bearings. It is turned 
inside out by hungering poetasters in search of a new 
" effect " as freely as an old glove by some thrifty dame 
intent on placing a prudent stitch. I might cite some 
striking examples, if I had space ; some are too detest- 
able. I do not know that I have found anything more 
suggestive than the revival, at the Gymnase, of that 
too familiar drama of the younger (the then very youth- 
ful) Dumas, the " Dame aux Camelias." Mademoiselle 
Pierson plays the heroine — Mademoiselle Pierson, the 
history of whose embonpoint is one of the topics of the 
day. She was formerly almost corpulent — fatally so 
for that beauty which even her rivals admitted to be 
greater than her talent. She devoted herself bravely 



108 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

to a diet of raw meat and other delicacies recommended 
by Banting, and she has recently emerged from the 
ordeal as superbly spare as a racing filly. This result, 
I believe, " draws " powerfully, though it seemed to me, 
I confess, that even raw meat had not made Mademoi- 
selle Pierson an actress. I went to the play because I 
had read in the weekly feuilleton of that very sound 
and sensible critic, M. Francisque Sarcey, that even in 
its old age it bore itself like a masterpiece, and produced 
an immense effect. If I could speak with the authority 
of Dr. Johnson, I should be tempted to qualify it with 
that vigorous brevity which he sometimes used so well. 
In the entr'actes I took refuge in the street to laugh at 
my ease over its colossal flimsiness. But I should be 
sorry to linger on the sombre side of the question, and 
my intention, indeed, was to make a note of none but 
pleasant impressions. I have, after all, received so 
many of these in Paris play-houses that my strictures 
seem gracelessly cynical. I bear the actors, at least, no 
grudge ; they are better than the authors. Moliere and 
De Musset, moreover, have not yet lost favor, and Cor- 
neille's " Cid " was recently revived with splendor and 
success. Here is a store of imperishable examples. 
What I shall think of regretfully when I have parted 
with the opportunity is, not the tragedies tourgeoises of 
MM. Dumas, Peuillet, and Pailleron, but the inimitable 
Got strutting about as the podesta in the " Caprices de 
Marianne," and twitching his magisterial train from the 
nerveless grasp of that delicious idiot, his valet ; and 
Delaunay murmuring his love-notes like a summer 
breeze in the ear of the blond Cecile ; and Coquelin as 



THE PAKISTAN STAGE. 109 

Mascarille, looking like an old Venetian print, and 
playing as if the author of the " Etourdi " were in the 
coulisse, prompting him; and M. Mounet Sully (the 
ardent young debutant of the " Cid ") shouting with the 
most picturesque fury possible the famous sortie, — 

" Paraissez Navarrins, Maures et Castillans ! " 

To an ingenuous American the Theatre Eran^ais may 
yet offer an aesthetic education. 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 

Rome, February, 1873. 

IT is certainly sweet to be merry at the right mo- 
ment; but the right moment hardly seems to me 
to be the ten days of the Eoman Carnival. It was a 
rather cynical suspicion of mine, perhaps, that they 
would not keep to my imagination the brilliant prom- 
ise of tradition ; but I have been justified by the event, 
and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal 
influences of the season than of the inalienable gravity 
of the place. There was a time when the Carnival was 
a serious matter, — that is, a heartily joyous one; but 
in the striding march of progress which Italy has re- 
cently witnessed, the fashion of public revelry has fallen 
wofully out of step. The state of mind and manners 
under which the Carnival was kept in generous good 
faith, I doubt if an American can very exactly conceive : 
he can only say to himself that, for a month in the 
year, it must have been comfortable to forget ! But now 
that Italy is made, the Carnival is unmade ; and we are 
not especially tempted to envy the attitude of a popula- 
tion who have lost their relish for play, and not yet ac- 
quired, to any striking extent, an enthusiasm for work. 
The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on the 



A EOMAN HOLIDAY. Ill 

whole, a sort of measure of that great breach with the 
past of which Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat 
muffled shock in September, 1870. A traveller who 
had seen old Eome, coming back any time during the 
past winter, must have immediately perceived that 
something momentous had happened, — something hos- 
tile to picturesqueness. My first warning was that, 
ten minutes after my arrival, I found myself face to 
face with a newspaper-stand. The impossibility in the 
other days of having anything in the journalistic line 
but the Osservatore Romano and the Voce della Verita 
used to seem to me to have much to do with the 
extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind 
to which Eome admitted you. But now the slender 
piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous 
note of eventide venders of the Capitale, the Liberia, 
and the Fanfulla ; and Eome reading unexpurgated 
news is another Eome indeed. For every subscriber 
to the Liberia, I incline to think there is an antique 
masker and reveller less. As striking a sic^n of the 
new regime seemed to me the extraordinary increase of 
population. The Corso was always a well-filled street : 
now it 's a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder 
where the new-comers are lodged, and how such 
spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen who 
stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere 
of those earner e mobiliate of which I have had glimp- 
ses. This, however, is their own question; bravely 
they resolve it. They seemed to proclaim, as I say, 
that by force of numbers Eome had been secular- 
ized. An Italian dandy is a very fine fellow ; but I 



112 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

confess these goodly throngs of them are to my sense 
an insufficient compensation for the absent monsignori, 
treading the streets in their purple stockings, and fol- 
lowed by their solemn servants, returning on their 
behalf the bows of the meaner sort ; for the mourning 
gear of the cardinals' coaches that formerly glittered 
with scarlet, and swung with the weight of the footmen 
clinging behind ; for the certainty that you '11 not, by 
the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope sitting deep 
in the shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers, 
like some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may 
meet the king, indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly 
ugly, as some idols, though not as inaccessible. The 
other day, as I was passing the Quirinal, he drove up in 
a low carriage, with a single attendant ; and a group of 
men and women, who had been w^aiting near the gate, 
rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The 
carriage slackened pace, and he pocketed their offerings 
with a business-like air — that of a good-natured man 
accepting hand-bills at a street-corner. Here was a 
monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his 
subjects — being adjured to right their WTongs. The 
scene ought to have been picturesque, but, somehow, 
it had no more color than a woodcut in an illustrated 
newspaper. Comfortable I should call it at most ; 
admirably so, certainly, for there were lately few sov- 
ereigns standing, I believe, wdth whom their people 
enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The king 
this year, however, has had as little to do with the Car- 
nival as the Pope, and the innkeepers and Americans 
have marked it for their own. 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 113 

It was advertised to begin at half past two o'clock 
of a certain Saturday ; and punctually, at the stroke of 
the hour, from my room across a wide court, I heard 
a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion of 
tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for 
whom I cared more than for a Eoman holiday; but as 
the minutes elapsed and the hubbub deepened, curios- 
ity got the better of affection, and I remembered that I 
was really within eye-shot of a spectacle whose reputa- 
tion had ministered to the day-dreams of my infancy. 
I used to have a scrap-book with a colored print of the 
starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a 
library rich in keepsakes and annuals whose frontis- 
piece was commonly a masked lady in a balcony — 
the heroine of a delightful tale further on. Agitated 
by these tender memories, I descended into the street ; 
but I confess that I looked in vain for a masked lady 
who might serve as a frontispiece, or any object what- 
ever that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled 
ladies there were in abundance ; but their masks were 
of ugly wire, and perfectly resembled the little covers 
placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their 
drapery was a shabby water-proof, with the hoods 
pulled over their chignons. They were armed with 
great tin scoops or funnels, with which they were 
solemnly shovelling lime and flour out of bushel bas- 
kets down upon the heads of the people in the street. 
They were packed into balconies all the way down the 
long vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous 
shower maintained a dense, gritty, unpalatable fog. 
The crowd was compact in the street, and the Ameri- 



114 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

cans in it were tossing back confetti out of great satch- 
els hung around their necks. It was quite the " you 're 
another " sort of repartee, and less flavored than I had 
hoped with the airy mockery which tradition associates 
with this festival. The scene was striking, certainly ; 
but, somehow, not as I had dreamed of its being. I 
stood contemplating it, I suppose, with a peculiarly 
tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I re- 
ceived half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic 
head. Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humor. I 
shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had a sud- 
den vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how 
peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure 
from any intrusion less sympathetic than one's own, 
certain outlying parts of Eome must just now be. The 
Carnival had received its death-blow, in my imagina- 
tion ; and it has been ever since but a thin and dusky 
ghost of pleasure that has flitted at intervals in and 
out of my consciousness. I turned my back on the 
Corso and wandered away, and found the grass-grown 
quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of a 
fellow-countryman ! And so, having set myself an ex- 
ample, I have been keeping Carnival by strolling per- 
versely along the silent circumference of Eome. I have 
no doubt I have lost a great deal. The Princess Mar- 
garet has occupied a balcony opposite the open space 
which leads into the Via Condotti, and, I believe, like 
the discreet princess that she is, has dealt in no mis- 
siles but bonbons, bouquets, and white doves. I would 
have waited half an hour any day to see the Princess 
Margaret holding a dove on her forefinger ; but I never 



A EOMAN HOLIDAY. 115 

chanced to notice any preparations for this delightful 
spectacle. And yet, do what you will, you cannot 
really elude the Carnival. As the days elapse, it filters 
down, as it were, into the manners of the common peo- 
ple, and before the week is over the very beggars at 
the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense of a 
domino. When you meet these specimens of dingy 
drollery capering about in dusky back streets at all 
hours of the day and night, and flitting out of black 
doorways between those greasy groups which cluster 
about Eoman thresholds, you feel that once upon a 
time the seeds of merriment must have been implanted 
in the Eoman temperament with a vigorous hand. An 
unsophisticated American cannot but be struck with 
the immense number of persons, of every age and vari- 
ous conditions, to w^hom it costs nothing in the nature 
of an ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets 
in the costume of a theatrical supernumerary. Fathers 
of families do it at the head of an admiring progeni- 
ture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it; all 
the family does it, with varying splendor, but the same 
good conscience. " A pack of babies ! " the philosophic 
American pronounces it for its pains, and tries to im- 
agine himself strutting along Broadway in a battered 
tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our vices are 
certainly different ; it takes those of the innocent sort 
to be ridiculous ! Eoman childishness seems to me so 
intimately connected w^ith Eoman amenity, urbanity, 
and general gracefulness, that, for myself, I should be 
sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other commodities 
should also cease to come to market. 



116 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my 
ears full of flour, by a glimpse of an intenser sort of 
life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. I walked 
down by the back streets to the steps which ascend 
to the Capitol — that long inclined plane, rather, broken 
at every two paces, which is the unfailing disappoint- 
ment, I believe, of tourists primed for retrospective 
raptures. Certainly the Capitol, seen from this side, 
is not commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so 
narrow, Michael Angelo's architecture in the quadran- 
gle at the top so meagre, the whole place, somehow, so 
much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the 
first ten minutes of your standing there Eoman history 
seems suddenly to have sunk through a trap-door. It 
emerges, however, on the other side, in the Forum ; and 
here, meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, 
you get gradually a delightful sense of the picturesque, 
l^owhere in Eome is there more color, more charm, 
more sport for the eye. The gentle slope, during the 
winter months, is always covered with lounging sun- 
seekers, and especially with those more constantly ob- 
vious members of the Eoman population — beggars, 
soldiers, monks, and tourists. The beggars and peas- 
ants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of 
loafing-places, the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The 
dwarfish look of the Capitol is greatly increased, I 
think, by the neighborhood of this huge blank stair- 
case, mouldering away in disuse, with the weeds in its 
crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn facade of 
the church. The sunshine glares on this great un- 
finished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 117 

expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness. 
Sometimes, massing its rusty screen against the deep 
blue sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch 
casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems to 
have an even more than Eoman desolation, and con- 
fusedly suggests Spain and Africa — lands with abso- 
lutely nothing but a past. The legendary wolf of 
Eome has lately been accommodated with a little arti- 
ficial grotto, among the cacti and the palms, in the fan- 
tastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of 
the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she 
holds a perpetual levee, and "draws," apparently, as 
powerfully as the Pope himself Above, in the little 
piazza before the stuccoed palace which rises so jaunt- 
ily on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are more 
loungers and knitters in the sun, seated round the 
massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus Aure- 
lius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude 
of this admirable figure in saying that it extends its 
arm with " a command which is in itself a benediction." 
I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the public 
places of the world has more to commend it to the 
popular heart. Irrecoverable simplicity has no sturdier 
representative. Here is an impression that the sculp- 
tors of the last three hundred years have been labori- 
ously trying to reproduce; but contrasted with this 
mild old monarch, their prancing horsemen seem like a 
company of riding-masters, taking out a young ladies' 
boarding-school. The admirably human character of 
the figure survives the rusty decomposition of the 
bronze and the archaic angularity of the design ; and 



118 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

one may call it singular that in the capital of Christen- 
dom the portrait most suggestive of a Christian will is 
that of a pagan emperor. 

You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of 
sublimity as you pass beyond the palace, and take your 
choice of two curving slopes, to descend into the Forum. 
Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice is but a 
modern excrescence upon the mighty cliff of a primitive 
construction whose great squares of porous tufa, as they 
descend, seem to resolve themselves back into the co- 
lossal cohesion of unhewn rock. There is a prodigious 
picturesqueness in the union of this airy, fresh-faced 
superstructure and these deep-plunging, hoary founda- 
tions ; and few things in Eome are more entertaining 
to the eye than to measure the long plumb-line which 
drops from the inhabited windows of the palace, with 
their little overpeeping balconies, their muslin curtains, 
and their bird-cages, down to the rugged handiwork 
of the Eepublic. In the Forum proper the sublime is 
eclipsed again, though the late extension of the excava- 
tions gives a chance for it. 

ISTothing in Eome helps your fancy to a more vigorous 
backward flight than to lounge on a sunny day over the 
railing which guards the great central researches. It 
gives one the oddest feeling to see the past, the ancient 
world, as one stands there, bodily turned up with the 
spade, and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible 
fact of time into a matter of soils and surfaces. The 
pleasure is the same — in kind — as what you enjoy at 
Pompeii, and the pain the same. It was not here, how- 
ever, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the 



A KOMAN HOLIDAY. 119 

spectacle on the Corso, but in a little church at the end 
of the narrow byway which diverges up the Palatine 
from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway leads 
you between high walls, then takes a bend and intro- 
duces you to a long row of rusty, dusty little pictures 
of the stations of the cross. Beyond these stands a 
small church with a facade so modest that you hardly 
recognize it until you see the leather curtain. I never 
see a leather curtain without lifting it: it is sure to 
cover a picture of some sort — good, bad, or indifferent. 
The picture this time was poor — whitewash and tar- 
nished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being 
its principal features. I should not have remained if 
I had not been struck with the attitude of the single 
worshipper — a young priest kneeling before one of the 
side-altars, who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave 
me a sidelong look — so charged with the languor of 
devotion that he immediately became an object of in- 
terest. He was visiting each of the altars in turn, and 
kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone in 
the church, and, indeed, in the whole neighborhood. 
There were no beggars, even, at the door; they were 
plying their trade on the skirts of the Carnival. In 
the whole deserted place he alone knelt there for re- 
ligion, and, as I sat respectfully by, it seemed to me 
that I could hear in the perfect silence the far-away 
uproar of the maskers. It was my late impression of 
these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the ex- 
traordinary gravity of the young priest's face — his 
pious fatigue, his droning prayer, and his isolation — 
which gave me just then and there a supreme vision 



120 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

of the religious passion — its privations and resigna- 
tions and exhaustions, and its terribly small share of 
amusement. He was young and strong and evidently 
of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the Carnival ; but 
planted there with his face pale with fasting and his 
knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on 
it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it 
to his way, that I half expected to see some heavenly 
portent out of a monastic legend come down and con- 
firm his choice. But, I confess, though I was not 
enamored of the Carnival myself, that his seemed a 
grim preference, and this forswearing of the world a 
terrible game — a gaining one only if your zeal never 
falters ; a hard fight when it does ! In such an hour, 
to a stout young fellow like the hero of my anecdote, 
the smell of incense must seem horribly stale, and the 
muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks a very meagre 
piece of splendor. And it would not have helped him 
much to think that not so very far away, just beyond 
the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for the mil- 
lion, for nothing. I doubt whether my young priest 
had thought of this. He had made himself a temple 
out of the very substance of his innocence, and his 
prayers followed each other too fast for the tempter to 
slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a solider 
fact of human nature than the love of coriandoli ! 

One never passes the Coliseum, of course, without 
paying it one's respects — without going in under one 
of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and 
sitting down awhile, generally at the foot of the cross 
in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 121 

sitting in the depths of some Alpine valley. The 
upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline seem 
as remote and lonely "as an Alpine ridge, and you look 
up at their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and 
silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling 
with which you would look at a gray cliff on which an 
eagle might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality 
of the great ruin is its chief interest ; beauty of detail 
has pretty well vanished, especially since the high- 
growing wild-flowers have been plucked away by the 
new government, whose functionaries, surely, at certain 
points of their task, must have felt as if they shared 
the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. Even 
if you are on your way to the Lateran, you will not 
grudge the twenty minutes it will take you, on leaving 
the Coliseum, to turn away under the Arch of Constan- 
tino, whose noble, battered bas-reliefs, with the chain of 
tragic statues — fettered, drooping barbarians — round 
its summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, 
to the little piazza before the church of San Giovanni 
e Paolo, on the slope of the Cselian. There is no more 
charmingly picturesque spot in Eome. The ancient 
brick apse of the church peeps down into the trees of 
the little wooded walk before the neighboring church 
of San Gregorio, intensely venerable beneath its exces- 
sive modernization; and a series of heavy brick but- 
tresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the 
short, steep, paved passage which leads you into the 
piazza. This is bordered on one side by the long me- 
diaeval portico of the church of the two saints, sustained 
by eight time-blackened columns of granite and mar- 

6 



122 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

ble ; on another by the great scantily windowed walls 
of a Passionist convent ; on a third by the gate of a 
charming villa, whose tall porter, with his cockade and 
silver-topped staff', standing sublime behind his grating, 
seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the 
beggars who sit at the church-door or lie in the sun 
along the farther slope which leads to the gate of the 
convent. The place always seems to me the perfection 
of an out-of-the-way corner — a place you would think 
twice before telling people about, lest you should find 
them there the next time you were to go. It is such a 
group of objects, singly and in their happy combina- 
tion, as one must come to Eome to find at one's villa 
door: but what makes it peculiarly a picture is the 
beautiful dark red campanile of the church, standing 
embedded in the mass of the convent. It begins, as so 
many things in Eome begin, with a stout foundation 
of antique travertine, and rises high, in delicately 
quaint mediaeval brickwork — little stories and aper- 
tures, sustained on miniature columns and adorned 
with little cracked slabs of green and yellow marble, 
inserted almost at random. When there are three or 
four brown-breasted contadini sleeping in the sun be- 
fore the convent doors, and a departing monk leading 
his shadow down over them, I think you will not find 
anything in Eome more sketcliable. 

If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy 
of your water-colors, you will never reach the Lateran. 
My business was much less with the interior of St. 
John Lateran, which I have never found peculiarly 
interesting, than with certain charming features of its 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 123 

surrounding precinct — the crooked old court beside 
it, which admits you to the Baptistery and to a de- 
lightful rear-view of the queer architectural odds and 
ends which in Eome may compose a florid ecclesiastical 
facade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble of 
chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projec- 
tions and inexplicable windows, than I have memory 
or phrases for; but the gem of the collection is the 
oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow traver- 
tine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was not 
meant to be suspected, and the brickwork retreating 
beneath and leaving it in the odd position of a tower 
under which you may see the sky. As to the great 
front of the church overlooking the Porta San Gio- 
vanni, you are not admitted behind the scenes; the 
phrase is quite in keeping, for the architecture has 
a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing — 
that of St. Peter's alone is more so ; and when from far 
off on the Campagna you see the colossal images of the 
mitred saints along the top standing distinct against 
the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their 
breezy draperies. The view from the great space which 
stretches from the church-steps to the city wall is the 
very prince of views. Just beside you, beyond the 
great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the marble 
staircase which (says the legend) Christ descended 
under the weight of Pilate's judgment, and which all 
Christians must forever ascend on their knees ; before 
you is the city gate which opens upon the Via Appia 
Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian 
aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the 



124 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

vertebral column of some monstrous, mouldering skele- 
ton, and upon the blooming brown and purple flats and 
dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the 
Alban Mountains, spotted with their w^hite, high-nes- 
tling towns ; and to your left is the great grassy space 
lined with dwarfish mulberry-trees, which stretches 
across to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce 
in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Eome I 
lost my heart to this idle tract, and wasted much time 
in sitting on the steps of the church and watching cer- 
tain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing 
there for the delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars 
now, and there are a great many of the king's recruits 
who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks adjoining Santa 
Croce, and are led forward to practise their goose-step 
on the sunny turf. Here, too, the poor old cardinals, 
who are no longer to be seen on the Pincio, descend 
from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable 
knees. These members alone still testify to the tradi- 
tional splendor of the princes of the Church ; for as 
they advance, the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash 
of scarlet stockings, and makes you groan at the victory 
of civilization over color. 

If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you 
have an easy compensation in traversing the long lane 
which connects it with Santa Maria Maggiore and 
entering the singularly perfect nave of that most de- 
lightful of churches. The first day of my stay in 
Eome, under the old dispensation, I spent in wandering 
at random through the city, with accident for my valet 
de place. It served me to perfection and introduced me 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 125 

to the best things ; among others to Santa Maria Mag- 
giore. First impressions, memorable impressions, are 
generally irrecoverable ; they often leave one the wiser, 
but they rarely return in the same form. I remember 
of my coming uninformed and unprepared into Santa 
Maria Maggiore, only that I sat for half an hour on the 
edge of the base of one of the marble columns of the 
beautiful nave and enjoyed a perfect feast of fancy. 
The place seemed to me so endlessly suggestive that 
perception became a sort of throbbing confusion of 
images, and I departed with a sense of knowing a good 
deal that is not set down in Murray. I have sat down 
more than once at the base of the same column again ; 
but you live your life but once, the parts as well as the 
whole. The obvious charm of the church is the ele- 
gant grandeur of the nave — its perfect shapeliness 
and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white 
marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with 
intricate gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir 
of an extraordinary splendor of effect, which I recom- 
mend you to visit of a fine afternoon. At such a time, 
the glowing western light, entering the high windows 
of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of color 
into sombre brightness, scintillates on the great solemn 
mosaic of the vault, touches the porphyry columns of 
the superb baldachino with ruby lights, and buries its 
shining shafts in the deep-toned shadows which cluster 
over frescos and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper 
charm to me, however, is the social atmosphere of the 
church, as I must call it for want of a better term — 
the sense it gives you, in common with most of the 



126 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

Eoman churches, and more than any of them, of having 
"been prayed in for several centuries by a singularly 
complicated and picturesque society. It takes no great 
shrewdness to perceive that the social role of the 
Church in Italy is terribly shrunken nowadays ; but 
also as little, perhaps, to feel that, as they stand, these 
deserted temples were produced by a society leavened 
through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and 
that they formed for ages the constant background of 
the human drama. They are, as one may say, the 
chu7'cMest churches in Europe — the fullest of gathered 
detail and clustering association. There is not a figure 
that I have read of in old-world social history that 
I cannot imagine in its proper place kneeling before 
the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa 
Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even 
among the most palpable realities, very much what 
one's capricious intellect projects there ; and I present 
my remarks simply as a reminder that one's constant 
excursions into churches are not the least interesting 
episodes of one's walks in Eome. 

I had meant to give a simple specimen of these daily 
strolls ; but I have given it at such a length that I have 
scanty space left to touch upon the innumerable topics 
which occur to the pen that begins to scribble about 
Eome. It is by the aimless jldnerie which leaves 
you free to follow capriciously every hint of entertain- 
ment, that you get to know Eome. The greater part of 
Eoman life goes on in the streets ; and to a traveller 
fresh from a country in which town scenery is rather 
wanting in variety, it is full of picturesque and curious 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 127 

incident. If at times you find it rather unsavory, you 
may turn aside into the company of shining statues, 
ranged in long vistas, into the duskily splendid gal- 
leries of the Doria and Colonna Palaces, into the sun- 
checkered boskages of antique villas, or into ever-empty 
churches, thankful even for a tourist's tribute of inter- 
est. The squalor of Eome is certainly a stubborn fact, 
and there is no denying that it is a dirty place. "Don't 
talk to me of liking Eome," an old sojourner lately said 
to me ; " you don't really like it till you like the dirt." 
This statement was a shock to my nascent passion ; 
but — I blush to write it — I am growing to think 
there is something in it. The nameless uncleanness 
with which all Eoman things are oversmeared seems to 
one at first a damning token of moral vileness. It fills 
you with more even of contempt than pity for Eoman 
poverty, and you look with inexpressible irritation at 
the grovelling creatures who complacently vegetate in 
the midst of it. Soon after his arrival here, an inti- 
mate friend of mine had an illness which depressed his 
spirits and made him unable to see the universal "joke" 
of things. I found him one evening in his arm-chair, 
gazing grimly at his half-packed trunk. On my asking 
him what he intended : " This horrible place," he cried, 
" is an insufferable weight on my soul, and it seems to 
me monstrous to come here and feast on human misery. 
You 're very happy to be able to take things easily ; 
you 've either much more philosophy than I, or much 
less. The squalor, the shabbiness, the provincialism, 
the barbarism, of Eome are too much for me. I must 
go somewhere and drink deep of modern civilization. 



128 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

This morning, as I came up the Scalianta, I felt as if 
I could strangle every one of those filthy models that 
loaf there in their shameless degradation and sit staring 
at you with all the ignorance, and none of the inno- 
cence, of childhood. Is n't it an abomination that our 
enjoyment here directly implies their wretchedness ; 
their knowing neither how to read nor to write, their 
draping themselves in mouldy rags, their doing never a 
stroke of honest work, their wearing those mummy- 
swathings round their legs from one year's end to 
another? So they 're kept, that Eome may be pictu- 
resque, and the forestieri abound, and a lot of profligate 
artists may paint wretchedly poor pictures of them. 
What should I stay for ? I know the Vatican by 
heart; and, except St. Peter's and the Pantheon, there's 
not a fine building in Eome. I 'm sick of the Italian 
face — of black eyes and blue chins and lying vowel 
sounds. I want to see people wdio look as if they 
knew how to read and write, and care for something 
else than flocking to the Pincio to suck the knobs on 
their canes and stare at fine ladies they '11 never by 
any hazard speak to. The Duke of Sermoneta has just 
been elected to — something or other — by a proper 
majority. But what do you think of their mustering 
but a hundred voters ? I like the picturesque, but 
I like the march of mind as well, and I long to see ? 
newspaper a little bigger than a play-bill. I shall leave 
by the first train in the morning, and if you value youi 
immortal soul you will come with me ! " 

My friend's accent was moving, and for some mo- 
ments I was inclined to follow his example ; but deep 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 129 

in my heart I felt the stir of certain gathered pledges 
of future enjoyment, and after a rapid struggle I bade 
him a respectful farewell. He travelled due north, and 
has been having a delightful winter at Munich, where 
the march of mind advances to the accompaniment 
of Wagner's music. Since his departure, to prove to 
him that I have rather more than less philosophy, I 
have written to him that the love of Eome is, in its 
last analysis, simply that perfectly honorable and le- 
gitimate instinct, the love of the status quo — the 
preference of contemplative and slow-moving-minds 
for the visible, palpable, measurable present — touched 
here and there with the warm lights and shadows of 
the past. " What you call dirt," an excellent authority 
has affirmed, " I call color " ; and it is certain that, if 
cleanliness is next to godliness, it is a very distant 
neighbor to chiaroscuro. That I have come to relish 
dirt as dirt, I hesitate yet awhile to affirm ; but I ad- 
mit that, as I walk about the streets and glance under 
black archways into dim old courts and up mouldering 
palace facades at the colored rags that flap over the 
twisted balustrades of balconies, I find I very much 
enjoy their " tone " ; and I remain vaguely conscious 
that it would require a strong stomach to resolve this 
tone into its component elements. I do not know that 
my immortal soul permanently suff'ers ; it simply retires 
for a moment to give place to that of a hankering water- 
color sketcher. As for the models on the Spanish Steps, 
I have lately been going somewhat to the studios, and 
the sight of the copies has filled me with compassion- 
ate tenderness for the originals. I regard them as an 

6* I 



130 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

abused and persecuted race, and I freely forgive them 
their decomposing gaiters and their dusky intellects. 

I owe the reader amends for writing either of Eoman 
churches or of Eoman walks, without an allusion to St. 
Peter's. I go there often on rainy days, with prosaic 
intentions of " exercise," and carry them out, body and 
mind. As a mere promenade, St. Peter's is unequalled. 
It is better than the Boulevards, than Piccadilly or 
Broadway, and if it were not the most beautiful place 
in the world, it would be the most entertaining. Few 
great works of art last longer to one's curiosity. You 
think you have taken its measure ; but it expands 
again, and leaves your vision shrunken. I never let 
the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind me, 
without feeling as if all former visits were but a vague 
prevision, and this the first crossing of the threshold. 
Tourists will never cease to be asked, I suppose, if they 
have not been disappointed in the size of St. Peter's ; 
but a few modest spirits, here and there, I hope, will 
never cease to say, No. It seemed to me from the first 
the hugest thing conceivable — a real exaltation of 
one's idea of space ; so that one's entrance, even from 
the great empty square, glaring beneath the deep blue 
sky, or cool in the far-cast shadow of the immense 
facade, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a 
going out. I should confidently recommend a first 
glimpse of the interior to a man of pleasure in quest 
of new sensations, as one of the strongest the world 
affords. There are days when the vast nave looks 
vaster than at others, and the gorgeous baldachino a 
longer journey beyond the far-spreading tessellated 



A KOMAN HOLIDAY. 131 

plain of the pavement, when the light has a quality 
which lets things look their largest, and the scattered 
figures mark happily the scale of certain details. Then 
you have only to stroll and stroll, and gaze and gaze, 
and watch the baldachino lift its bronze architecture, 
like a temple within a temple, and feel yourself, at the 
bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle to a 
crawling dot. Much of the beauty of St. Peter's re- 
sides, I think, in the fact, that it is all general beauty, 
that you are appealed to by no specific details, that the 
details indeed, when you observe them, are often poor 
and sometimes ridiculous. The sculptures, with the 
sole exception of Michael Angelo's admirable Pieta, 
which lurks obscurely in a dusky chapel, are either bad 
or indifferent; and the universal incrustation of mar- 
ble, though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant ef- 
fect than much later work of the same sort — that, for 
instance, of St. Paul's without the Walls. The supreme 
beauty of the church is its magnificently sustained sim- 
plicity. It seems — as it is — a realization of the hap- 
piest mood of a colossal imagination. The happiest 
mood, I say, because this is the only one of Michael 
Angelo's works in the presence of which you venture 
to be cheerful. You may smile in St. Peter's without 
a sense of sacrilege, which you can hardly do, if you 
have a tender conscience, in Westminster Abbey or 
N'otre Dame. The abundance of enclosed light has 
much to do with your smile. There are no shadows, to 
speak of, no marked effects of shade ; but effects of 
light innumerable — points at which the light seems 
to mass itself in airy density, and scatter itself in 



132 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the 
office of shadow in Gothic churches ; hangs like a roll- 
ing mist along the gilded vault of the nave, melts into 
bright interfusion the mosaic scintillations of the dome, 
clings and clusters and • lingers and vivifies the whole 
vast atmosphere. A good Catholic, I suppose, is a 
Catholic anywhere, in the grandest as well as in the 
humblest churches ; but to a traveller not especially 
pledged to be devout, St. Peter's speaks more of con- 
tentment than of aspiration. The mind seems to ex- 
pand there immensely, but on its own level, as we may 
say. It marvels at the reach of the human imagination 
and the vastness of our earthly means. This is heaven 
enough, we say : what it lacks in beauty it makes up 
in certainty. And yet if one's half-hours at St. Peter's 
are not actually spent on one's knees, the mind reverts 
to its tremendous presence with an ardor deeply akin 
to a passionate effusion of faith. When you are weary 
of the swarming democracy of your fellow-tourists, of 
the unremunerative aspects of human nature on the 
Corso and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combi- 
nation of coronets on carriage panels and stupid faces 
in carriages, of addled brains and lacquered boots, of 
ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and the 
myriad tokens of a halting civilization, the image of the 
great temple depresses the balance of your doubts and 
seems to refute the invasive vulgarity of things and 
assure you that nothing great is impossible. It is a 
comfort, in other words, to feel that there is at the 
worst nothing but a cab-fare between your discontent 
and one of the greatest of human achievements. 



A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 133 

This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these 
remarks of mine which have strayed so wofuUy from 
their jovial text, but that I ought fairly to confess that 
my last impression of the Carnival was altogether Car- 
nivale'sque. The merry-making on Shrove Tuesday had 
an air of native vigor, and the dead letter of tradition 
seemed at moments to be informed with a living spirit. 
I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon 
on the Corso. Almost every one was a masker, but I 
had no need to conform; the pelting rain of confetti 
effectually disguised me. I cannot say I found it all 
very exhilarating; but here and there I noticed a 
brighter episode — a capering clown inflamed with 
contagious jollity, some finer humorist, forming a circle 
every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable sallies. 
One clever performer especially pleased me, and I 
should have been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural 
man. I had a fancy that he was taking a prodigious 
intellectual holiday, and that his gayety was in inverse 
ratio to his daily mood. He was dressed like a needy 
scholar, in an ancient evening-coat, with a rusty black 
hat and gloves fantastically patched, and he carried a 
little volume carefully under his arm. His humors 
were in excellent taste, his whole manner the perfection 
of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to relish him 
vastly, and he immediately commanded a gleefully at- 
tentive audience. Many of his sallies I lost ; those I 
cauo'ht were excellent. His trick was often to becjin 
by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the 
chin and complimenting him on the intelligenza della 
sua fisionomicL I kept near him as long as I could ; 



134 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

for lie seemed to me an artist, cherishing a disinterested 
passion for the grotesque. But I should have liked to 
see him the next morning, or when he unmasked that 
night, over his hard-earned supper, in a smoky trattoria ! 
As the evening went on, the crowd thickened and be- 
came a motley press of shouting, pushing, scrambling 
— everything but squabbling — revellers. The rain 
of missiles ceased at dusk ; but the universal deposit 
of chalk and flour was trampled into a cloud, made 
lurid by the flaring pyramids of gas-lamps, replacing 
for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. Early 
in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the 
moccohtti, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter 
resigned beforehand to be cashiered for want of enter- 
prise. From the mouth of a side-street, over a thousand 
heads, I beheld a huge, slow-moving illuminated car, 
from which blue-lights and rockets and Eoman candles 
were being discharged, and meeting in a dim fuliginous 
glare far above the house-tops. It was like a glimpse 
of some public orgy in ancient Babylon. In the small 
hours of the morning, walking homeward from a private 
entertainment, I found Ash-Wednesday still kept at 
bay. The Corso was flaring with light, and smelt like 
a circus. Every one was taking friendly liberties with 
every one else, and using up the dregs of his festive 
energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here 
and there certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red, 
as devils, were leaping furiously about with torches, and 
being supposed to startle you. But they shared the 
universal geniality, and bequeathed me no midnight 
fears as a pretext for keeping Lent — the carnevale dei 



A EOMAN HOLIDAY. 135 

jpreti, as I read in that profanely radical sheet, the 
Capitale. Of this, too, I have been having glimpses. 
Going lately into Santa Francesca Eomana, the pic- 
turesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a 
feast for the eyes — a dim, crimson-toned light through 
curtained windows, a great festoon of tapers round the 
altar, a bulging girdle of lamps before the sunken shrine 
beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans scattered 
in the happiest composition on the pavement. It was 
better than the moccoletti. 



ROMAN RIDES. 

Eome, last of April, 1873. 

I SHALL always remember the first I took : out of 
the Porta del Popolo, to where the Ponte MoUe, 
whose single arch sustains a weight of historic tradition, 
compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four great- 
mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the 
hill, and along the old posting-road to Florence. It 
was mild midwinter, the season, peculiarly, of color on 
the Roman Campagna ; and the light was full of that 
mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which 
haunts the after- visions of those who have known 
Eome like the memory of some supremely irresponsible 
pleasure. An hour away, I pulled up, and stood for 
some time at the edge of a meadow, gazing away into 
remoter distances. Then and there, it seemed to me, I 
measured the deep delight of knowing the Campagna. 
But I saw more things in it than it is easy to repeat. 
The country rolled away around me into slopes and 
dells of enchanting contour, checkered with purple and 
blue and blooming brown. The lights and shadows 
were at play on the Sabine Mountains — an alternation 
of tones so exquisite that you can indicate them only 
by some fantastic comparison to sapphire and amber. 



ROMAN RIDES. 137 

In the foreground a contadino, in his cloak and peaked 
hat, was jogging solitary on his ass ; and here and there 
in the distance, among blue undulations, some white 
village, some gray tower, helped deliciously to make 
the scene the typical " Italian landscape " of old-fash- 
ioned art. It was so bright and yet so sad, so still and 
yet so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the mur- 
mur of an extinguished life, that you could only say 
it was intensely and deliciously strange, and that the 
Eoman Campagna is the most suggestive place in the 
world. To ride once, under these circumstances, is of 
course to ride again, and to allot to the Campagna a 
generous share of the time one spends in Eome. 

It is a pleasure that doubles one's horizon, and one 
can scarcely say whether it enlarges or limits one's 
impression of the city proper. It certainly makes St. 
Peter's seem a trifle smaller, and blunts the edge of 
one's curiosity in the Forum. If you have ridden much, 
to think of Eome afterwards will be, I imagine, to think 
still respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican 
and the Pincio, the streets and the duskily picturesque 
street-life ; but it will be even more to wonder, with an 
irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you 
shall feel yourself bounding over the flower-smothered 
turf, or pass from one framed picture to another beside 
the open arches of the crumbling aqueducts. You look 
at Eome so often from some grassy hill-top — hugely 
compact within its walls, with St. Peter's overtopping 
all things and yet seeming small, and the vast girdle of 
marsh and meadow receding on all sides to the moun- 
tains and the sea — that you come to remember it at 



138 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

last as hardly more than a large detail in an impressive 
landscape. And within the walls you think of your 
intended ride as a sort of romantic possibility; of 
the Campagna generally as an illimitable experience. 
One's rides certainly make Eome a richer place to live 
in than most others. To dwell in a city which, much 
as you grumble at it, is, after all, very fairly a modern 
city ; with crowds, and shops, and theatres, and cafes, 
and balls, and receptions, and dinner-parties, and all 
the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains ; to 
have at your door the good and evil of it all ; and yet 
to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it 
a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look 
at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in 
the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling 
none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged 
shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless broth- 
erhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats 
and staggering little kids treading out wild desert 
smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds ; and 
then to come back through one of the great gates, and, 
a couple of hours later, find yourself in the " world," 
dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking 
about Middlemarch to a young English lady, or listen- 
ing to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very 
low-cut shirt — all this is to lead a sort of double life, 
and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions 
than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to 
dispose of. I touched lately upon this theme with a 
friend who, I fancied, would understand me, and who 
immediately assured me that he had just spent a day 



ROMAN RIDES. 139 

which this mingled diversity of sensation made to the 
days one spends elsewhere what an uncommonly good 
novel is to a newspaper. " There was an air of idle- 
ness about it, if you will/' he said, " and it was cer- 
tainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, 
being, after all, unused to long stretches of dissipation, 
this was why I had a half-feeling that I was reading an 
odd chapter in the history of a person very much more 
of a Mros cle roman than myself." Then he proceeded 
to relate how he had taken a long ride with a lady 
whom he extremely admired. " We turned off from 
the Tor di Quinto Koad to that castellated farm-house 
you know of — once a Ghibelline fortress — whither 
Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of which 
the surrounding landscape is still artistically sugges- 
tive. We went into the inner court, a cloister almost, 
with the carven capitals of its loggia columns, and 
looked at a handsome child swinging shyly against the 
half-opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, 
behind her, made her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous 
water-colors. We talked with the farmer, a handsome, 
pale, fever- tainted fellow, with a well-to-do air, who 
did n't in the least prevent his affability taking a turn 
which resulted in his acceptance of small coin; and 
then we galloped away and away over the meadows 
which stretch with hardly a break to Veii. The day 
was strangely delicious, with a cool gray sky and just 
a touch of moisture in the air, stirred by our rapid 
motion. The Campagna, in the colorless, even light, 
was more solemn and romantic than ever ; and a ragged 
shepherd, driving a meagre, straggling flock, whom we 



140 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

stopped to ask our way of, was a perfect type of pas- 
toral, weather-beaten misery. He was precisely the 
shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching. 
There were faint odors of spring in the air, and the 
grass here and there was streaked with great patches 
of daisies ; but it was spring with a foreknowledge of 
autumn — a day to be enjoyed with a sober smile — 
a day somehow to make one feel as if one had seen 
and felt a great deal — quite, as I say, like a Mros de 
Toman. Apropos of such people, it was the illustri- 
ous Pelham, I think, who, on being asked if he rode, 
replied that he left those violent exercises to the ladies. 
But under such a sky, in such an air, over acres of 
daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly the gentlest, 
the most refined of pleasures. The elastic bound of 
your horse is the poetry of motion ; and if you are so 
happy as to add to it — not the prose of companion- 
ship, riding comes to seem to you really as an intellec- 
tual pursuit. My gallop, at any rate," said my friend, 
" threw me into a mood which gave an extraordinary 
zest to the rest of the day." He was to go to a dinner- 
party at a villa on the edge of Eome, and Madame 
X ,who was also going, called for him in her car- 



riage. " It was a long drive," he went on, " through 
the Forum, past the Coliseum, She told me a long 
story about a most interesting person. Toward the end 
I saw through the carriage window a slab of rugged 
sculptures. We were passing under the Arch of Con- 
stantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare 
antique mosaic — one of the largest and most perfect ; 
the ladies, on their way to the drawing-room, trail over 



ROMAN RIDES. 141 

it the flounces of Worth. We drove home late, and 
there 's my day." 

On your exit from most of the gates of Eome you 
have generally half an hour's riding through winding 
lanes, many of which are hardly less charming than the 
open meadows. On foot, the walls and high hedges 
would vex you and spoil your walk ; but in the saddle 
you generally overtop them and see treasures of pictu- 
resqueness. Yet a Eoman wall in the springtime is, for 
that matter, as picturesque as anything it conceals. 
Crumbling grain by grain, colored and mottled to a 
hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged struc- 
ture of brick extruding through its coarse complexion 
of peeling stucco, its creeping lace-work of wandering 
ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe 
of stouter flowers against the sky — it is as little as 
possible a blank partition ; it is almost a piece of laud- 
scape. At this moment, in mid-April, all the ledges 
and cornices are wreathed with flaming poppies, nod- 
ding there as if they knew so well what faded grays 
and yellows were an offset to their scarlet. But the 
best point in a dilapidated wall of vineyard or villa is 
of course the gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap 
rococo scroll-work, its balls and shields and mossy dish- 
covers (as they always seem to me) and flanked with 
its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without taking 
out my mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a 
vignette in the insubstantial record of my ride. They 
always look to me intensely sad and dreary, as if they 
led to the moated grange where Mariana waited in 
desperation for something to happen ; and I fancy the 



142 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

usual inscription over the porch to be a recommenda- 
tion to those who enter to renounce all hope of any- 
thing but a glass of more or less agreeably acrid vino 
rom,ano. For what you chiefly see over the walls and 
at the end of the straight, short avenue of rusty cy- 
presses are the appurtenances of a vigna — a couple of 
acres of little upright sticks, blackening in the sun, and 
a vast, sallow-faced, scantily windowed mansion, whose 
expression denotes little intellectual life beyond what 
goes to the driving of a hard bargain over the tasted 
hogsheads. If Mariana is there, she certainly has no 
pile of old magazines to beguile her leisure. Intellec- 
tual life, if the term is not too pompous, seems to the 
contemplative tourist as he wanders about Eome, to 
exist only as a kind of thin deposit of the past. Within 
the rococo gateway, which itself has a vague literary 
suggestiveness, at the end of the cypress walk, you will 
probably see a mythological group in rusty marble — 
a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and 
Daphne — the relic of an age when a Eoman proprietor 
thought it fine to patronize the arts. But I imagine 
you are safe in thinking that it constitutes the only 
literary allusion that has been made on the premises 
for three or four generations. 

There is a franker cheerfulness — though certainly a 
proper amount of that forlornness which lurks about 
every object to which the Campagna forms a back- 
ground — in the primitive little taverns where, on the 
homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often 
glad to rein up and demand a bottle of their best. 
But their best and their worst are the same, though 



ROMAN EIDES. 143 

with a shifting price, and plain vino hianco or vino 
rosso (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in 
which they deal. There is a ragged bush over the 
door, and within, under a dusky vault, on crooked 
cobble-stones, sit half a dozen contadini in their indigo 
jackets and goatskin breeches, with their elbows on the 
table. There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars 
at the door, pretty enough in their dusty rags, with 
their fine eyes and intense Italian smile, to make you 
forget your private vow of doing your individual best 
to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn 
their old vices. Was Porta Pia bombarded three years 
ago that Peppino should still grow up to whine for a 
copper ? But the Italian shells had no direct message 
for Peppino's stomach — and you are going to a dinner- 
party at a villa. So Peppino " points " an instant for 
the copper in the dust and grows up a Eoman beggar. 
The whole little place is the most primitive form of 
hostelry ; but along any of the roads leading out of the 
city you may find establishments of a higher type, with 
Garibaldi, superbly mounted and foreshortened, painted 
on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress opening a 
fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard 
with the classic pine-wreathed arbor casting thin shad- 
ows upon benches and tables draped and cushioned with 
the white dust from which the highways from the gates 
borrow most of their local color. But, as a rider, I 
say, you avoid the high-roads, and, if you are a person 
of taste, don't grumble at the occasional need of fol- 
lowing the walls of the city. City walls, to a properly 
constituted Anierican, can never be an object of in- 



144 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

difference ; and there is certainly a fine solemnity in 
pacing in the shadow of this massive cincture of Eome. 
I have found myself, as I skirted its base, talking of 
trivial things, but never without a sudden reflection on 
the deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A 
twelvemonth ago the raw plank fences of a Boston sub- 
urb, inscribed with the virtues of healino- drugs, bris- 
tied along my horizon : now I glance with idle eyes at 
this compacted antiquity, in which a more learned sense 
may read portentous dates and signs — Servius, Aure- 
lian, Honorius. But even to idle eyes the walls of 
Eome abound in picturesque episodes. In some places, 
where the huge brickwork is black with time, and cer- 
tain strange square towers look down at you with still 
blue eyes — the Eonian sky peering through lidless 
loopholes — and there is nothing but white dust in the 
road and solitude in the air, I feel like a wandering 
Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial Empire. 
The wall of China must have very much such a gaunt 
robustness. The color of the Eoman ramparts is every- 
where fine, and their rugged patchwork has been sub- 
dued by time and weather into the mellow harmony 
which painters love. On the northern side of the city, 
behind the Vatican, St. Peter's, and the Trastevere, I 
have seen them glowing in the late afternoon with the 
tones of ancient bronze and rusty gold. Here, at vari- 
ous points, they are embossed with the Papal insignia — 
the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys — for 
which the sentimental tourist has possibly a greater 
kindness than of yore. With the dome of St. Peter's 
resting on their cornice and the hugely clustered archi- 



ROMAN RIDES. 145 

lecture of the Vatican rising from them as from a ter- 
race, they seem indeed the valid bulwark of an ecclesi- 
astical city. Vain bulwark, alas ! sighs the sentimental 
tourist, fresh from the meagre entertainment of this latter 
Holy Week. But he may find picturesque consolation 
in this neighborhood at a source where, as I pass, I never 
fail to apply for it. At half an hour's walk beyond 
the Porta San Pancrazio, beneath the wall of the Villa 
Doria, is a delightfully pompous ecclesiastical gateway 
of the seventeenth century, erected by Paul V. to com- 
memorate his restoration of the aqueducts through 
which the stream bearing his name flows towards that 
fine, florid portico which covers its clear-sheeted out- 
gush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across 
the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, 
and one can hardly pause before it without seeming to 
assist at a ten minutes' revival of old Italy — without 
feeling as if one were in a cocked hat and sword, and 
were coming up to Eome in another mood than Lu- 
ther's, with a letter of recommendation to the mistress 
of a Cardinal. 

The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the 
Tiber ; and it is hard to say which, for the rider, has 
the greater charm. The half-dozen rides you may take 
from the Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of 
traditional Koman interest, and lead you through a far- 
strewn wilderness of ruins — a scattered maze of tombs 
and towers and nameless fragments of antique masonry. 
The landscape here has two great features ; close before 
you on one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban 
Mountains, deeply, fantastically blue in most weathers. 



146 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

and marbled with the vague white masses of their 
scattered towns and villas. It is hard to fancy a softer 
curve than that with which the mountain sweeps down 
from Albano to the plain ; it is a perfect example of the 
classic beauty of line in the Italian landscape — that 
beauty which, when it fills the background of a picture, 
makes us look in the foreground for a broken column 
couched upon flowers, and a shepherd piping to dan- 
cing nymphs. At your side, constantly, you have the 
broken line of the Claudian Aqueduct, carrying its 
broad arches far away into the plain. The meadows 
along which it lies are not the smoothest in the world 
for a gallop, but there is no pleasure greater than to 
wander over it. It stands knee-deep in the flower- 
strewn grass, and its rugged piers are hung with ivy, as 
the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every 
archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance 
beyond — of the snow-tipped Sabines and lonely So- 
racte. As the spring advances, the whole Campagna 
smiles and waves with flowers ; but I think they are 
nowhere more rank and lovely than in the shifting 
shadow of the aqueducts, where they muffle the feet 
of the columns and smother the half-dozen brooks 
which wander in and out like silver meshes between 
the legs of a file of giants. They make a niche for 
themselves, too, in every crevice and tremble on the 
vault of the empty conduits. The ivy hereabouts, in 
the springtime, is peculiarly brilHant and delicate ; and 
though it cloaks and muffles these Eoman fragments far 
less closely than the castles and abbeys of England, it 
hangs with the light elegance of all Italian vegetation. 



KOMAN EIDES. 147 

It is partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines 
are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impres- 
sive. They seem the very source of the solitude in 
which they stand ; they look like architectural spectres, 
and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, 
as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial 
vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is 
a great neighborhood of ruins, many of which, it must 
be confessed, you have applauded in many an album. 
But station a peasant with sheepskin coat and ban- 
daged legs in the shadow of the tomb or tower best 
known to drawing-room art, and scatter a dozen goats 
on the mound above him, and the picture has a charm 
which has not yet been sketched away. 

The other side of the Campagna has wider fields and 
smoother turf and perhaps a greater number of delight- 
ful rides ; the earth is sounder, and there are fewer 
pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies 
higher and catches more breezes, and the grass, here 
and there, is for great stretches as smooth and level as 
a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains before you, 
but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the 
nearer Apennines, and west of them, along the course 
of the Tiber, the long seaward level of deep-colored 
fields, deepening as they recede to the blue and purple 
of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day, you 
may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are 
the rides, perhaps, to remember most fondly, for tliey 
lead you to enchanting nooks, and the landscape has 
details of supreme picturesqueness. Indeed, when my 
sense reverts to the lingering impressions of these 



148 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

blessed days, it seems a fool's errand to have attempted 
to express them, and a waste of words to do more than 
recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight, at 
the end of March, toward the Porta Cavalleggieri, and 
note what he sees. At this hour the Campagna seems 
peculiarly its melancholy self, and I remember roadside 
"effects " of the most poignant suggestiveness. Certain 
mean, mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts 
have an indefinably sinister look ; there was one in 
especial, of which it was impossible not to fancy that 
a despairing creature had once committed suicide there, 
behind bolted door and barred window, and that no one 
has since had the pluck to go in and see why he never 
came out. But, to my sense, every slight wayside de- 
tail in the country about Eome has a penetrating elo- 
quence, and I may possibly exaggerate the charms of 
very common things. This is the more likely, because 
the charms I touch on are so many notes in the scale 
of melancholy. To delight in the evidence of meagre 
lives might seem to be a heartless pastime, and the 
pleasure, I confess, is a pensive one. Melancholy is as 
common an influence from Southern things as gayety, 
I think ; it rarely fails to strike a ISTorthern observer 
when he misses what he calls comfort. Beauty is no 
compensation for the loss ; it only makes it more poig- 
nant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Eo- 
man cottages and farm-houses — beauty of light, of 
atmosphere, and of vegetation ; but their charm for 
seekers of the picturesque is the way in which the lus- 
trous air seems to illuminate their intimate desolation. 
Man lives more with Nature in Italy than in New 



ROMAN RIDES. 149 

England ; she does more work for him and gives him 
more holidays than in our short-summered clime ; and 
his home is therefore much more bare of devices for 
helping him to do without her, forget her and forgive 
her. These reflections are, perhaps, the source of the 
entertainment you find in a moss-coated stone stairway 
climbing outside of a wall ; in a queer inner court, be- 
fouled with rubbish and drearily bare of convenience ; 
in an ancient, quaintly carven well, worked with infi- 
nite labor from an overhanging window ; in an arbor 
of time-twisted vines, under which you may sit with 
your feet in the dirt, and remember as a dim fable that 
there are races for which the type of domestic allure- 
ment is the parlor hearth-rug. For reasons apparent 
or otherwise, these things amuse me beyond expression, 
and I am never weary of staring into gateways, of lin- 
gering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, of 
feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unc- 
tuous indoor shadows. 

I must not forget, however, that it is not for way- 
side effects that one rides away behind St. Peter's, 
but for the enchanting sense of wandering over bound- 
less space, of seeing great classic lines of landscape, 
of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so 
full of " style " that you can think of no painter who 
deserves to have you admit that they suggest him — 
hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure to gallop 
far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the 
Avhole delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and 
linger, and try and grasp some ineffaceable memory of 
sky and color and outline. Your pace can hardly help 



150 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

falling into a contemplative measure at the time, every- 
where so wonderful, but in Eome so persuasively di- 
vine, when the winter begins palpably to soften and to 
quicken into spring. Far out on the Campagna, early 
in February, you feel the first vague, earthy emanations, 
which in a few weeks come wandering into the heart of 
the city and throbbing through the close, dark streets. 
Springtime in Eome is an immensely poetic affair ; but 
you must stand often in the meadows, between grass 
and sky, to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated 
rhythm. The winter has an incontestable beauty, and is 
pre-eminently the time of color — the time when it is no 
affectation, but homely verity, to talk about the " pur- 
ple " tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and 
goes your purple is streaked with green, and the rich, 
dark bloom of the distance begins to lose its intensity. 
But your loss is made up by other gains ; none more 
precious than that inestimable gain to the ear — the 
disembodied voice of the lark. It comes with the early 
flowers, the white narcissus and the cyclamen, the half- 
buried violets and the pale anemones, and makes the 
whole atmosphere ring, like a vault of tinkling glass. 
You never see the bird himself, and are utterly unable 
to localize his note, which seems to come from every- 
where at once, to be some hundred-throated voice of 
the air. Sometimes you fancy you just distinguish 
him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser 
throb in the universal pulsation of light. As the 
weeks go on, the flowers multiply and the deep blues 
and purples of the hills turn to azure and violet, and 
creep higher toward the narrowing snow-line of the 



ROMAN RIDES. 151 

Sabines. The first hour of your ride becomes rather 
warm for comfort, but you beguile it with brushing the 
hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the hedges, and 
catching at the wild rose and honeysuckle ; and when 
you get into the meadows, there is stir enough in the 
air to lighten the dead weight of the sun. The Eoman 
air, however, is not a tonic medicine, and it seldom 
allows your rides to be absolutely exhilarating. It has 
always seemed to me, indeed, part of their picturesque- 
ness that your keenest enjoyment is haunted with a 
vague languor. Occasionally, when the sirocco blows, 
this amounts to a sensation really worth having on 
moral and intellectual grounds. Then, under the gray 
sky, toward the veiled distances which the sirocco gen- 
erally brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a 
world from which all hope has departed, and in which, 
in spite of the flowers that make your horse's footfalls 
soundless, nothing is left save a possibility of calamity 
which your imagination is unable to measure, but from 
which it hardly shrinks. An occasional sense of de- 
pression from this source may almost amount to exhila- 
ration; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose 
of morbid pleasure. I almost think that you may best 
feel the peculiar beauty of the Campagna on those mild 
days of winter when the brilliant air alone suffices to 
make the whole landscape smile, and you may pause 
on the brown grass in the sunny stillness, and, by lis- 
tening long enough, almost fancy you hear the shrill 
of the midsummer cricket. It is detail and ornament 
that vary from month to month, from week to week 
even, and make your rides over familiar fields a con- 



152 . TEANSATL ANTIC SKETCHES. 

stant feast of unexpectedness ; but the great essential 
lines and masses of the Campagna preserve throughout 
the year the same impressive serenity. Soracte, in 
January and April, rises from its blue horizon like an 
island from the sea, with an elegance of contour which 
no mood of the year can deepen or diminish. You 
know it well; you have seen it often in the mellow 
backgrounds of Claude ; and it has such an irresistibly 
classical, academical air that, while you look at it, your 
saddle begins to feel like a faded old arm-chair in a 
palace gallery. A month's riding on the Campagna, 
indeed, will show you a dozen prime Claudes. After I 
had seen them all, I went piously to the Doria gallery 
to refresh my memory of its two famous specimens, 
and I vastly enjoyed their delightful air of reference to 
something which had become a part of my personal 
experience. Delightful it certainly is to feel the com- 
mon element in one's own impressions and those of a 
genius whom it has helped to do great things. Claude 
must have wandered much on the Campagna, and in- 
terfused its divine undulations with his exquisite con- 
ception of the picturesque. He was familiar with a 
landscape in which there was not a single uncompro- 
mising line. I saw, a few days later, a small finished 
sketch from his hand, in the possession of an American 
artist, which was almost startling in its clear reflec- 
tion of forms unaltered by the two centuries which 
have dimmed and cracked the paint and canvas. 

This unbroken continuity of impressions which I 
have tried to indicate is an excellent example of the 
intellectual background of all enjoyment in Eome. It 



ROMAN RIDES. 153 

effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for 
your sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it 
reverberates ; it recalls, commemorates, resuscitates 
something else. At least half the merit of everything 
you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but the 
larger half, here, is generally that it has suited some 
one else, and that you can never flatter yourself you 
have discovered it. It is historic, literary, sugges- 
tive ; it has played some other part than it is just 
then playing to your eyes. It was an admission of 
this truth that my discriminating friend who showed 
me the Claudes found it impossible to designate a cer- 
tain delightful region which you enter at the end of an 
hour's riding from Porta Cavalleggieri as anything but 
Arcadia. The exquisite correspondence of the term in 
this case altogether revived its faded bloom ; here 
veritably the oaten pipe must have stirred the windless 
air, and the satyrs have laughed among the brookside 
reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away in 
a chain between low hills over which slender trees are 
so discreetly scattered that each one is a resting-place 
for a shepherd. The elements of the scene are simple 
enough, but the composition has extraordinary refine- 
ment. By one of those happy chances which keep 
observation, in Italy, always in her best humor, a 
shepherd had thrown himself down under one of the 
trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been 
washing his feet, I suppose, in the neighboring brook, 
and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short 
breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the 
shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out 

7* 



154 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

on the turf, and his soft peaked hat over his long hair 
crushed back like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he 
was exactly the figure of the background of this happy 
valley. The poor fellow, lying there in rustic weariness 
and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of 
old-world meanings to new-world eyes. Such eyes 
may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in 
the cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all 
equestrians. These are less severely pastoral than our 
Arcadia, and you might more properly lodge there a 
damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. 
Among them is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers 
and shrubs, and the whole place has such a charming 
woodland air, that, casting about me the other day for 
a compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New 
Hampshire. My compliment had a double edge, and I 
had no sooner uttered it than I smiled — or sighed — 
to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about me 
the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of 
Italy alone — the natural stamp of the land which has 
the singular privilege of making one love her unsancti- 
fied beauty all but as well as those features of one's 
own country toward which nature's small allowance 
doubles that of one's own affection. In this matter 
of suggestiveness, no rides are more profitable than 
those you take in the Villa Doria or the Villa Bor- 
ghese ; or do not take, possibly, if you prefer to reserve 
these particular regions (the latter in especial) for your 
walking hours. People do ride, however, in both vil- 
las, which deserve honorable mention in this regard. 
The Villa Doria, with its noble site, its lovely views. 



ROMAN RIDES. 155 

its great groups of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so 
individual, its lawns and flowers and fountains, its 
altogether princely disposition, is a place where one 
may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant day, with an 
agreeable sense of its being a rather more elegant pas- 
time to balance in one's stirrups than to trudge on even 
the smoothest gravel But at the Villa Borghese the 
walkers have the best of it ; for they are free of those 
delicious, outlying corners and bosky by-ways which the 
rumble of barouches never reaches. Early in March it 
becomes a perfect epitome of the spring. You cease to 
care much for the melancholy greenness of the disfea- 
tured statues which has been your chief winter's inti- 
mation of verdure ; and before you are quite conscious 
of the tender streaks and patches in the great, quaint, 
grassy arena round which the Propaganda students, in 
their long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs 
revolving the gossip of Paradise, you spy the brave 
little violets uncapping their azure brows beneath the 
high-stemmed pines. One's walks, here, would take us 
too far, and one's pauses detain us too long, when, in 
the quiet parts, under the wall, one comes across a 
group of certain charming little scholars in full-dress 
suits and white cravats, shouting over their play in 
clear Italian, while a grave young priest, under a tree, 
watches them over the top of his book. I have wished 
only to say a word for one's Eides — to suggest that 
they give one, not only exercise, but memories. 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 

I MADE a note after my first stroll at Albano to the 
effect that I had been talking of the picturesque all 
my life, but that now for a change I beheld it. I had 
been looking all winter across the Campagna at the 
free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half- 
dozen towns shining on its purple side, like vague sun- 
spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply 
an agreeable incident in the varied background of 
Eome. But now that during the last few days I have 
been treating it is a foreground, and suffering St. Peter's 
to play the part of a small mountain on the horizon, 
with the Campagna swimming mistily in a thousand 
ambiguous lights and shadows in the interval, I find as 
good entertainment as any in the Eoman streets. The 
walk I speak of was just out of the village, to the 
south, toward the neighboring town of Ariccia, — 
neighboring these twenty years, since the Pope (the 
late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his 
superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides 
it from Albano. At the risk of being thought fan- 
tastic, I confess that the Pope's having built the via- 
duct — in this very recent antiquity — made me linger 



EOMAN NEIGHBOEHOODS. 157 

there in a pensive posture and marvel at the march of 
history and at Pius the Mnth's beginning already to 
profit by the sentimental allowances we make to van- 
ished powers. An ardent nero then would have had 
his own way with me, and obtained an easy admission 
that the Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far 
down into the charming valley which slopes out the 
ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna 
winds the steep, stone-paved road, at the bottom of 
which, in the good old days, tourists in no great hurry 
saw the mules and oxen tackled to their carriage for 
the opposite ascent. And, indeed, even an impatient 
tourist might have been content to lounge back in his 
jolting chaise and look out at the mouldy foundations 
of the little city, plunging into the verdurous flank of 
the gorge. If I were asked what is the most delect- 
able piece of oddity hereabouts, I should certainly say 
the way in which the crumbling black houses of these 
ponderous villages plant their weary feet on the flow- 
ery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you enter 
one of them you invariably find yourself lingering out- 
side of its pretentious old gateway, to see it clutched 
and stitched, as it were, to the stony hillside, by this 
rank embroidery of wild weeds and flowers. Just at 
this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast be- 
tween their dusky ruggedness and this tender fringe of 
yellow and pink and violet. All this you may observe 
from the viaduct at Ariccia ; but you must wander 
below to feel the full force of the eloquence of our 
imaginary papalino. The pillars and arches of pale 
gray peperino arise in huge tiers, with a magnificent 



158 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

spring and solidity. The older Eomans built no bet- 
ter ; and the work has a deceptive air of being one of 
their sturdy bequests, which helps one to drop a sigh 
over Italy's long, long yesterday. In Ariccia I found a 
little square with a couple of mossy fountains, occupied 
on one side by a vast, dusky-faced Palazzo Chigi, and 
on the other by a goodly church with an imposing 
dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice, and 
is adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of 
the seventeenth century. It gave a great value to this 
fine old decoration, that preparations were going for- 
ward for a local festival, and that the village carpenter 
was hanging certain mouldy strips of crimson damask 
against the piers of the vaults. The damask might 
have been of the seventeenth century, too, and a group 
of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident 
awe. I regarded it myself with interest ; it seemed to 
me to be the tattered remnant of a fashion that had 
gone out. I thought again of the poor, disinherited 
Pope, and wondered whether, when that venerable frip- 
pery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any more 
will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but 
shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wher- 
ever you go in Italy, you receive some such intimation 
as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholicism, and 
every church I have glanced into on my walks here- 
abouts has given me an almost pitying sense of it. 
One finds one's self at last (without fatuity, I hope) 
feeling sorry for the loneliness of the remaining faith- 
ful. The churches seem to have been made so for the 
world, in its social sense, and the world seems so irrevo- 



KOMAN NEIGHBOEHOODS. 159 

cably away from them. They are in size out of all 
modern proportion to the local needs, and the only 
thing that seems really to occupy their melancholy 
vacancy is the smell of stale incense. There are pic- 
tures on all the altars by respectable third-rate paint- 
ers ; pictures which I suppose once were ordered and 
paid for and criticised by worshippers who united taste 
with piety. At Genzano, beyond Ariccia, rises on the 
gray village street a pompous Eenaissance temple, 
whose imposing nave and aisles would contain the 
population of a metropolis. But where is the taste of 
Ariccia and Genzano ? Where are the choice spirits 
for whom Antonio Eaggi modelled the garlands of his 
dome, and a hundred clever craftsmen imitated Guido 
and Caravaggio ? Here and there, from the pavement, 
as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions 
with more profane importunities ; or a grizzled peasant 
on rusty-jointed knees, tilted forward with his elbows 
on a bench, reveals the dimensions of the patch in his 
blue breeches. But where is the connecting link be- 
tween Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for 
whom an undoubted original is only a something be- 
hind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear meaning 
save that you must bow to it ? You find a vague 
memory of it at best in the useless grandeurs about 
you, and you seem to be looking at a structure of which 
the stubborn earth -scented foundations alone remain, 
with the carved and painted shell that bends above 
them, while the central substance has utterly crumbled 
away. 

I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace 



160 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

than befits a brisk constitutional, if I say that I also 
fell a thinking before the shabby facade of the old 
Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow, in its gray for- 
lornness, to respond to the sadly superannuated expres- 
sion of the opposite church ; and indeed, nnder any 
circumstances, what contemplative mind can forbear to 
do a little romancing in the shadow of a provincial 
palazzo ? On the face of the matter, I know, there is 
often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort 
of dusky blankness invests the establishment, which 
has often a rather imbecile old age. But a hundred 
brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the 
Chigi Palace seemed to me in the suggestive twilight a 
very pretty specimen of a haunted house. Its base- 
ment walls sloped outward like the beginning of a pyr- 
amid, and its lower windows were covered with mas- 
sive iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, 
I saw the pale glimmer of flowers on a terrace, and on 
the roof I beheld a great covered loggia, or belvedere, 
with a dozen window-panes missing, or mended with 
paper. Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old 
manners than an ancestral palace towering in this 
haughty fashion over a shabby little town ; you hardly 
stretch a point when you call it an impression of feu- 
dalism. The scene may pass for feudal to American 
eyes, for which a hundred windows on a facade mean 
nothing more exclusive than a hotel kept (at the worst} 
on the European plan. The mouldy gray houses on 
the steep, crooked street, with their black, cavernous 
archways filled with evil smells, with the braying of 
asses, and with human intonations hardly more musical, 



EOMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 161 

the haggard and tattered peasantry staring at you with 
hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks (there 
are still enough to he effective), the soldiers, the mounted 
constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the 
dark, overgrown palace frowning over it all from barred 
window and guarded gateway — what more than all 
this do we dimly descry in a mental image of the dark 
ao^es ? With the stronsjest desire to content himself 
with the picturesqueness of things, the tourist can 
hardly help wondering whether the picture is not half 
spoiled for pleasure by all that it suggests of the hard- 
ness of human life. At Genzano, out of the very midst 
of the village squalor, rises the Palazzo Cesarini, sep- 
arated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between 
peasant and prince the contact is unbroken, and one 
would say that Italian good-nature must be sorely taxed 
by their mutual allowances ; that the prince in especial 
must be trained not to take things too hard. There are 
no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of 
the blessings of a happy mediocrity of fortune. When 
he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peas- 
ant against a sunny wall, sawing off his dinner from a 
hunch of black bread. 

I must confess, however, that " feudal " as it amused 
me to find the little piazza of Ariccia, it displayed no 
especial symptoms of o, jacquerie. On the contrary, the 
afternoon being cool, many of the villagers were con- 
tentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined with 
green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder and 
surmounted with a peaked hat, form one of the few 
lingering remnants of " costume " in Italy ; others were 



162 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

tossing wooden balls, light-heartedly enough, on the 
grass outside the town. The egress, on this side, is 
under a great stone archway, thrown out from the pal- 
ace and surmounted with the family arms. Nothing 
could better confirm your fancy that the townsfolk are 
groaning serfs. The road leads away through the 
woods, like many of the roads hereabouts, among trees 
less remarkable for their size than for their picturesque 
contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment 
at which I write, are full of the raw green light of 
early spring, and I find it vastly becoming to the vari- 
ous complexions of the wild flowers which cover the 
waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres 
in such lovely exuberance ; the sturdiest pedestrian be- 
comes a lingering idler if he allows them to catch his 
eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood thrown 
back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds ; and 
here and there, in the duskier places, great sheets of 
forget-me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These 
are the commonest plants ; there are dozens more I 
know no name for — a rich profusion, in especial, of a 
beautiful, five-petalled flower with its white texture 
pencilled with hair- strokes which certain fair copyists 
I know of would have to hold their breath to imitate. 
An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of 
its Anglo-Saxon brothers, but it contrives, in propor- 
tion, to be perhaps even more effective. It crooks its 
back and twists its arms and clinches its hundred fists 
with the most fantastic extravagance, and wrinkles its 
bark into strange rugosities from which its first scat- 
tered sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a 



EOMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 163 

morbid fungus. But the tree which has the greatest 
charm to Northern eyes is the cold, gray-green ilex, 
whose clear, crepuscular shade is a delicious provision 
ao-ainst a Southern sun. The ilex has even less color 
than the cypress, but it is much less funereal, and a 
landscape full of ilexes may still be said to smile — 
soberly. It abounds in old Italian gardens, where the 
boughs are trimmed and interlocked into vaulted cor- 
ridors, in which, from point to point, as in the niches 
of some dimly frescoed hall, you encounter mildewed 
busts, staring at you with a solemnity which the even 
gray light makes strangely intense. A humbler rela- 
tive of the ilex, though it does better things than help 
broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, 
which covers many of the neighboring hillsides with 
its little smoky puffs of foliage. A piece of pictu- 
resqueness I never weary of is the sight of the long 
blue stretch of the Campagna, making a high horizon, 
and resting on this vaporous base of olive-tops. A 
tourist intent upon a metaphor might liken it to the 
ocean seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on 
the strand. 

To do perfect justice to the wood- walk away from 
Ariccia, I ought to touch upon the birds that were 
singing vespers as I passed. But the reader would 
find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the pro- 
gramme of a concert he had been unable to attend. I 
have no more learning about bird-music than would 
help me to guess that a dull, dissyllabic refrain in the 
heart of the wood came from the cuckoo ; and when at 
moments I heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more 



164 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

suggestive modulation, I could only Jiope it was the 
nightingale. I have listened for the nightingale more 
than once, in places so charming that his song would 
have seemed but the articulate expression of their 
beauty; but I have never heard anything but a pro- 
voking snatch or two — a prelude that came to noth- 
ing. But in spite of a natural grudge, I generously 
believe him a great artist, or at least a great genius — 
a creature who despises any prompting short of absolute 
inspiration. For the rich, the multitudinous melody 
around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the 
prodigal spirit of picturesqueness. The wood was ring- 
ing with sound, because it was twilight, spring, and 
Italy. It was also because of these good things and 
various others beside, that I relished so keenly my visit 
to the Capuchin convent, upon which I emerged after 
half an hour in the wood. It stands above the town, 
on the slope of the Alban Mount, and its wild garden 
climbs away behind it and extends its melancholy in- 
fluence. Before it is a stiff little avenue of trimmed 
ilexes which conducts you to a grotesque little shrine 
beneath the staircase ascending to the church. Just 
here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you 
may take a very pretty fright ; for as you draw near 
you behold, behind the grating of the shrine, the start- 
ling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk. A sickly 
lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at 
you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death 
in life. Horror of horrors, you murmur; is this a 
Capuchin penance ? You discover of course in a mo- 
ment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 165 

a pious dummy, and his spectral visage a matter of tlie 
paint-brush. You resent his intrusion on the surround- 
ing loveliness ; and as you proceed to demand enter- 
tainment at their convent, you declare that the Capu- 
chins are very vulgar fellows. This declaration, as I 
made it, was supported by the conduct of the simple 
brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedi- 
ence to my knock, and, on learning my errand, demurred 
about admitting me at so late an hour. If I would re- 
turn on the morrow morning, he v/ould be most happy. 
He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this 
was the very hour of my desire, and that the garish 
morning light would do no justice to the view. These 
were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only his 
good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his 
imagination that was moved. So that when, passing 
through the narrow cloister and out upon the grassy 
terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with 
folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable har- 
mony with the scene, I ventured to doubt that he knew 
he was picturesque amid picturesqueness. This, how- 
ever, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was 
cause enough for gratitude that, though he was there 
before me, he was not a fellow-tourist with an opera- 
glass slung over hi^ shoulder. There was reason in my 
fancy for seeing the convent in the expiring light, for 
the scene was supremely enchanting. Directly below 
the terrace lay the deep-set circle of the Alban Lake, 
shining softly through the light mists of evening. This 
beautiful pool — it is hardly more — occupies the crater 
of a prehistoric volcano — a perfect cup, moulded and 



166 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

smelted by furnace-fires. The rim of the cup rises 
high and densely wooded around the placid, stone-blue 
water, with a sort of natural artificiality. The sweep 
and contour of the long circle are admirable ; never 
was a lake so charmingly lodged. It is said to be 
of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue water 
seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling 
lava, it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous 
antecedents. The winds never reach it, and its surface 
is never ruffled ; but its deep-bosomed placidity seems 
to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communica- 
tion with the capricious and treacherous forces of na- 
ture. Its very color has a kind of joyless beauty — a 
blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. 
Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its 
own, it seemed the very type of a legendary pool, and 
I could easily have believed that I had only to sit long 
enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic 
nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon to 
me with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are 
haunted with these vague Pagan influences, that two 
convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere ? 
From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the gray 
Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less 
picturesque certainly than the mosljji obstinate myth it 
may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild 
tangle of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling 
vines which, in these hard days, are left to take care 
of themselves ; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, 
but none the less charming for that, in the deepening 
dusk, with its steep, grassy vistas struggling away into 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 167 

impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the 
sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed, crum- 
bling pavilions, which rise from the corners of the far- 
ther wall, and give you a wider and lovelier view of 
the lake and hills and sky. 

I have perhaps justified to the reader the declaration 
with which I started, and helped him to fancy — and 
possibly to remember — that one's walks at Albano are 
entertaining. They may be various, too, and have little 
in common but the merit of keeping in the shade. 
" Galleries " the roads are prettily called, and with a 
great deal of justice ; for they are vaulted and draped 
overhead and hung with an immense succession of pic- 
tures. As you follow the long road from Genzano to 
Trascati, you have perpetual views of the Campagna, 
framed by clusters of trees, and its vast, iridescent ex- 
panse completes the charm and comfort of your ver- 
durous dusk. I compared it just now to the sea, and 
with a good deal of truth, for it has the same fantastic 
lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and 
gloom. But I have seen it at moments — chiefly in 
the misty twilight — when it seemed less like the 
positive ocean than like something more portentous — 
the land in a state of dissolution. I could fancy that 
the fields were dimly surging and tossing, and melt- 
ing away into quicksands, and that the last ''effect" 
was being presented to the eyes of imaginative tourists. 
A view, however, which has the merit of being really 
as interesting as it seems, is that of the Lake of Nemi, 
which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare 
with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this 



168 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

case is particularly odious ; for in order to prefer one 
lake to the other, you have to discover faults where 
there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but she lies 
in a deeper cup; and if she has no gray Franciscan 
convent to guard her woody shores, she has, in quite 
the same position, the little, high-perched, black town 
to which she gives her name, and which looks across 
at Genzano on the opposite shore, as Palazzuola con- 
templates Castel Gandolfo. The walk from Ariccia to 
Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a 
certain grassy piazza from which three public ave- 
nues stretch away under a double row of stunted and 
twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at Gen- 
zano — I mentioned it just now — whose gardens 
overhang the lake ; but he has also a porter, in a 
faded, rakish-looking livery, who shakes his head at 
your proffered franc, unless you can reinforce it with 
a permit countersigned at Eome. For this annoying 
complication of dignities he is justly to be denounced ; 
but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in 
the seventeeth century planted this shady walk. Never 
was a prettier approach to a town than by these low- 
roofed, light-checkered corridors. Their only defect is 
that they prepare you for a town with a little more 
rustic coquetry than Genzano possesses. It seemed to 
me to have more than the usual portion of mouldering 
disrepair ; to look dismally as if its best families had all 
fallen into penury together and lost the means of keep- 
ing anything better than donkeys in their great, dark, 
vaulted basements, and mending their broken window- 
panes. It was a propos of this drear Genzano that I 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 169 

had a difference of opinion with a friend, who main- 
tained that there was nothing in the same line so pret- 
ty in Europe as a pretty New England village. The 
proposition, to a sentimental tourist, seemed at first 
inacceptable ; but, calmly considered, it has a meas- 
ure of truth. I am not fond of white clapboards, cer- 
tainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones of ancient 
stucco and peperino ; but I confess I am sensible of 
the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dah- 
lias glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of 
heavy-scented lilacs bending over a white paling to 
brush your cheek. 

" I prefer Siena to Lowell," said my friend ; " but I 
prefer Northampton to Genzano." In fact, an Italian 
village is simply a miniature Italian city, and its vari- 
ous parts imply a town of fifty times the size. At 
Genzano there are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no 
odors but foul ones. Elowers and perfumes are all 
confined to the high-walled precincts of Duke Cesarini, 
to which you must obtain admission twenty miles 
away. The houses, on the other hand, would generally 
lodge a New England cottage, porch and garden and 
high-arching elms included, in one of their cavernous 
basements. These vast gray dwellings are all of a fash- 
ion denoting more generous social needs than any they 
serve nowadays. They seem to speak of better days, 
and of a fabulous time when Italy was not shabby. 
For what follies are they doing penance ? Through 
what melancholy stages have their fortunes ebbed ? 
You ask these questions as you choose the shady side 
of the long blank street, and watch the hot sun glaring 



170 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

upon the dust-colored walls and pausing before the 
fetid gloom of open doors. 

I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, 
perched upon a cliff high above the lake, on the oppo- 
site side ; but after all, when I had climbed up into it 
from the water-side, and passed beneath a great arch 
which, I suppose, once topped a gateway, and counted 
its twenty or thirty apparent inhabitants peeping at me 
from black doorways, and looked at the old round tower 
at whose base the village clusters, and declared that it 
was all queer, queer, desperately queer, I had said all 
that is worth saying about it. Nemi has a much bet- 
ter appreciation of its lovely position than Genzano, 
where your only view of the lake is from a dunghill 
behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round 
tower is an overhanging terrace, from which you may 
feast your eyes on the only freshness they find in these 
dusky human hives — the blooming seam, as one may 
call it, of strong wild-flowers which binds the crumbling 
walls to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di Papa I must 
say as little. It kept generally what I had fancied the 
picturesque promise of its name ; but the only object I 
made a note of as I passed through it on my way to 
Monte Cavo, which rises directly above it, was a little 
black house with a tablet in its face setting forth that 
Massimo d'Azeglio had dwelt there. The story of his 
sojourn is not the least entertaining episode in his de- 
lightful Memoirs. From the summit of Monte Cavo is 
a prodigious view, which you may enjoy with whatever 
good-nature is left you by the reflection that the mod- 
ern Passionist convent which occupies this admirable 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 171 

site was erected by the Cardinal of York (grandson of 
James II.) on the demolished ruins of an immemorial 
temple of Jupiter : the last foolish act of a foolish 
race. For me, I confess, this folly spoiled the convent, 
and the convent all but spoiled the view ; for I kept 
thinking how fine it would have been to emerge "upon 
the old pillars and sculptures from the lava pavement 
of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown 
and untrodden through the woods. A convent, how- 
ever, which nothing spoils is that of Palazzuola, to 
which I paid my respects on this same occasion. It 
rises on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge of the 
Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site — 
that of early Alba Longa — it displaced nothing more 
precious than memories and legends so dim that the 
antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a 
meagre little church and the usual impossible Perugino 
with a couple of tinsel crowns for the Madonna and the 
Infant inserted into the canvas; and it has also a 
musty old room hung about with faded portraits and 
charts and queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, w^hich 
borrowed a mysterious interest from the sudden assur- 
ance of the simple Franciscan brother who accompa- 
nied me, that it was the room of the Son of the Kins 
of Portugal ! But my peculiar pleasure was the little 
thick-shaded garden which adjoins the convent and 
commands from its massive artificial foundations an 
enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in 
cabbages and lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, 
with his frock tucked up, was bending with a solicitude 
which he interrupted to remove his skull-cap and greet 



172 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

me with tlie unsophisticated, sweet -humored smile 
which every now and then in Italy does so much to 
make you forget the uncleanness of monachism. The 
rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal um- 
brage, making a dank circle round an old cracked foun- 
tain, black with water-moss. The parapet of the ter- 
race is furnished with good stone seats, where you may 
lean on your elbows and gaze away a sunny half-hour, 
and, feeling the general charm of the scene, declare 
that the best mission of Italy in the world has been to 
produce this sort of thing. If I wished a single word 
for the whole place and its suggestions, I should talk 
of their exquisite mildness. Mild it all seemed to me 
as a dream, as resignation, as one's thoughts of another 
life. I could have fancied that my lingering there was 
not an experience of the irritable flesh, but a deep rev- 
ery on a summer's day over a passage in a poem by a 
man of genius. 

From Albano you may take your way through sev- 
eral ancient little cities to Frascati, a rival centre of 
villeggiatura, the road following the hillside for a long 
morning's walk and passing through alternations of 
denser and clearer shade — the dark, vaulted alleys of 
ilex and the brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. 
The Campagna lies beneath jom continually, with the 
sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of the sun 
upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty 
Eome, to the north, lying at no great length in the idle 
immensity around it. The highway passes below Cas- 
tel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an eminence 
behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 173 

tiara and twisted cordon; and I confess that I have 
more than once chosen the roundabout road for the 
sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia. Cas- 
tel Gandolfo is indeed an ecclesiastical village and 
under the peculiar protection of the Popes, whose huge 
summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a sort of 
rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Frascati, I 
necessarily revert to my first impressions, gathered on 
the occasion of the feast of the Annunziata, which falls 
on the 25th of March, and is celebrated by a peasants' 
fair. As Murray strongly recommends you to visit 
this spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant 
exhibition of all the costumes of modern Latium, I took 
an early train to Frascati and measured, in company 
with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the 
half-hour's interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is 
held. The road winds along the hillside, among the 
silver-sprinkled olives, and through a charming wood 
where the ivy seemed tacked upon the oaks by woman's 
fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones. 
It was covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar pleasure- 
takers, and the only creatures who were not in a state 
of manifest hilarity were the pitiful little overladen, 
over-beaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to 
themselves in any description of these neighborhoods) 
and the horrible beggars who were thrusting their sores 
and stumps at you from under every tree. Every one 
was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of dust 
and distance, and filling the air with that childlike 
jollity which the blessed Italian temperament never 
goes roundabout to conceal. There is no crowd, surely, 



174 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

at once so jovial and so gentle as an ItaKan crowd, and 
I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed 
third-class car in which I went out from Eome would 
introduced me to so much smiling and so little swear- 
ing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little village, with 
a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hill- 
side, and nothing to charm the tourist but its situa- 
tion and its old fortified abbey. After pushing about 
among the shabby little booths and declining a number 
of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes, and pork, I was 
glad to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of 
the abbey and divert myself with the view. This gray 
ecclesiastical citadel is a very picturesque affair, hang- 
ing over the hillside on plunging foundations which 
bury themselves among the olive-trees. It' has massive 
round towers at the corners, and a grass-grown moat, 
enclosing a church and monasterv. The outer court, 
w^ithin the abbatial gatew^ay, now serves as the public 
square of the village, and in fair-time, of course, wit- 
nessed the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to 
be found in certain great vaults and cellars of the 
abbey, where wine was being freely dispensed from 
gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling 
grottos, shady trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs 
had been improvised, under which a prodigious guz- 
zling went forward. All this was very curious, and I 
was roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. 
The banquet was far less substantial, of course, but it 
had an air of old-world revelry which could not fail to 
suggest romantic analogies to an ascetic American. 
There was a feast of reason close at hand, however. 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 175 

and I was careful to visit the famous frescos of Do- 
menichiuo in the adjoining church. It sounds rather 
brutal perhaps to say that, when I came back into the 
clamorous little piazza, I found the peasants s willing- 
down their sour wine more picturesque than the mas- 
terpieces (Murray calls them so) of the famous Bologn- 
ese. It amounts, after all, to saying that I prefer 
Teniers to Domenichino ; which I am willing to let pass 
for the truth. The scene under the rickety trellises 
was the more suggestive of Teniers that there were no 
costumes to make it too Italian. Murray's attractive 
statement on this point was, like many of his state- 
ments, much truer twenty years ago than to-day. 
Costume is gone or fast going ; I saw among the wo- 
men not a single crimson bodice and not a couple of 
classic head-cloths. The poorer sort are dressed in vul- 
gar rags of no fashion and color, and the smarter ones 
adorned with calico gowns and printed shawls of the 
vilest modern fabric, with their dusky tresses garnished 
with nothing more pictorial than the lustrous pomatum. 
The men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with 
their slouched and pointed hats and open-breasted 
shirts and rattling leather leggings, may remind one 
sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the 
woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out 
of the church I found a delightful nook — a queer lit- 
tle terrace before a more retired and tranquil drinking- 
shop — where I called for a bottle of wine to help me 
to guess why I liked Domenichino no better. 

This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the 
end of the piazza, Avhich was itself simply a great ter- 



176 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

race ; and one reached it, picturesquely, by ascending 
a short inclined plane of grass-grown cobble-stones and 
passing across a little dusky kitchen, through whose 
narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape be- 
yond was twinkling on old earthen pots. The terrace 
was oblong, and so narrow that it held but a single 
small table, placed lengthwise ; but nothing could be 
pleasanter than to place one's bottle on the polished 
parapet. Here, by the time you had emptied it, you 
seemed to be swinging forward into immensity — 
hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful 
gorge with a twinkling stream wandered down the 
hill far below you, beyond which Marino and Castel 
Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could 
count the towers of Eome and the tombs of the Appian 
Way. I don't know that I came to any very distinct 
conclusion about Domenichino ; but it was perhaps 
because the view was perfection, that he seemed to 
me more than ever to be mediocrity. And yet I don't 
think it was my bottle of wine, either, that made me 
feel half sentimental about him ; it was the sense of 
there being something cruelly feeble in his tenure of 
fame, something derisive in his exaggerated honors. 
It is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him to have 
Murray assuring ten thousand Britons every winter in 
the most emphatic manner that his Communion of 
St. Jerome is the " second finest picture in the world." 
If this were so, I should certainly, here in Eome, where 
such institutions are convenient, retire into the very 
nearest convent; with such a world I should have a 
standing quarrel. And yet Domenichino is an inter- 



ROMAN NEIGHBORHOODS. 177 

esting painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in 
most moods, to see one of his pictures. He is so su- 
premely good an example of effort detached from in- 
spiration, and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, 
that one of his fine, frigid performances ought to hang 
in a conspicuous place in every academy of design. 
Few pictures contain more urgent lessons or point a 
more precious moral ; and I would have the head mas- 
ter in the drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by 
the hand and lead him up to the Triumph of David or 
the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl, and 
make him some such little speech as this : " This great 
picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you 
must never paint ; to give you a perfect specimen of 
what in its boundless generosity the providence of na- 
ture created for our fuller knowledge — an artist whose 
development was a negation. The great thing in art 
is charm, and the great thing in charm is spontaneity. 
Domenichino had great talent, and here and there he 
is an excellent model; he v/as devoted, conscientious, 
observant, industrious ; but now that we 've seen pretty 
well what can simply be learned do its best, these 
things help him little with us, because his imagination 
was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, 
its efforts never gave it the heart-ache. It went about 
trying this and that, concocting cold pictures after cold 
receipts, dealing in the second-hand and the ready- 
made, and putting into its performances a little of 
everything but itself. When you see so many things 
in a picture, you might fancy that among them all 
charm might be born, but they are really but the hun- 

8* L 



178 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

died mouths tlirougli which you may hear the picture 
murmur, ' I 'm dead ! ' It 's in the simplest thing it 
has that a picture lives — in its temper ! Look at all 
the great talents, at Domenichino as well as at Titian ; 
but think less of dogma than of plain nature, and I can 
almost promise you that yours will remain true." This 
is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined 
might say; and after all we are all unwilling to let 
our last verdict be an unkind one upon any great be- 
quest of human effort. The faded frescos in the chapel 
at Grotta Ferrata leave one a memory the more of 
what man has done for man, and mingle harmoniously 
enough with one's multifold impressions of Italy. It 
was, perhaps, an ungracious thing to be critical, among 
all the appealing old Italianisms round me, and to 
treat poor exploded Domenichino more harshly than, 
when I walked back to Frascati, I treated the charming 
old water- works of the Villa Aldobrandini. I should 
like to confound these various products of antiquated 
art in a genial absolution ; and I should like especially 
to tell how fine it was to watch this prodigious foun- 
tain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy rock- 
work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fan- 
tastic old hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads 
sit posturing to receive it. The sky above the ilexes 
was incredibly blue, and the ilexes themselves incredi- 
bly black ; and to see the young white moon peeping 
above the trees, you could easily have fancied it was 
midnight. I should like, furthermore, to expatiate on 
the Villa Mondragone, the most grandly impressive 
of Italian villas. The great Casino is as big as the 



ROMAN NEIGHBOEHOODS. 179 

Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands 
perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Pe- 
ter's, looking straight away over black cypress-tops 
into the shining vastness of the Campagna. Every- 
thing, somehow, seemed immense and solemn; there 
was nothing small, but certain little nestling blue shad- 
ows on the Sabine Mountains, to which the terrace 
seems to carry you wonderfully near. The place has 
been for some time lost to private uses, for it figures 
fantastically in a novel of Madame Sand {La Daniella) 
and now — in quite another way — as a Jesuit college 
for boys. The afternoon was perfect, and, as it waned, 
it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful golden haze. 
Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little 
collegians, with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits strid- 
ing at their heels. We all know the monstrous prac- 
tices of these people; yet as I watched the group I 
verily believe I declared that if I had a little son he 
should go to Mondragone and receive their crooked 
teachings, for the sake of the other memories — the 
avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, 
the atmosphere of antiquity. But, doubtless, when a 
sense of the picturesque has brought one to this, it is 
time one should pause. 



THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME. 

Rome, May 20, 1873. 

ONE may say without injustice to anybody that 
the state of mind of a great many foreigners in 
Eome is one of intense impatience for the moment 
when all other foreigners shall have departed. One 
may confess to this state of mind, and be no misan- 
thrope. Eome has passed so completely for the winter 
months into the hands of the barbarians, that that esti- 
mable character, the " quiet observer," finds it con- 
stantly harder to concentrate his attention. He has an 
irritating sense of his impressions being perverted and 
adulterated ; the venerable visage of Eome betrays an 
unbecoming eagerness to see itself mirrored in English, 
American, German eyes. It is not simply that you are 
never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots 
where you have dreamt of persuading the shy genius 
loci into confidential utterance ; it is not simply that 
St. Peter's, the Vatican, the Palatine, are forever ring- 
ing with English voices : it is the general oppressive 
feeling that the city of the soul has become for the 
time a monstrous mixture of the watering-place and 
the curiosity-shop, and that its most ardent life is that 
of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios, and 



THE AFTEK-SEASON IN ROME. 181 

yawn through palaces and temples. But you are told 
of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, 
when Eome becomes Eome again, and you may have it 
all to yourself. "You may like Eome more or less 
now," I was told during the height of the season ; "but 
you must wait till the month of May to love it. Then 
the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone ; the gal- 
leries and ruins are empty, and the place," said my 
informant, who was a Frenchman, " renait a elle-meme!' 
Indeed, I was haunted all winter by an irresistible 
prevision of what Eome must be in spring. Certain 
charming places seemed to murmur : " Ah, this is noth- 
ing ! Come back in May, and see the sky above us 
almost black with its excess of blue, and the new grass 
already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tum- 
bling in odorous spray over the walls, and the warm 
radiant air dropping gold into all our coloring." 

A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on 
my return, the first time I went into the Corso, I be- 
came conscious of a change. Something very pleasant 
had happened, but at first I was at a loss to define it. 
Then suddenly I comprehended : there were but half 
as many people, and these were chiefly good Italians. 
There had been a great exodus, and now, physically, 
morally, aesthetically, there was elbow-room. In the 
afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was 
almost dull. The band was playing to a dozen ladies, 
as they lay in their landaus, poising their lace-fringed 
parasols ; but they had only one light-gloved dandy 
apiece hanging over their carriage-doors. By the para- 
pet of the great terrace which sweeps the city stood 



182 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

three or four quiet observers looking at the sunset, 
with their Baedekers peeping out of their pockets 
— the sunsets not being down with their tariff in 
these precious volumes. I good-naturedly hoped 
that, like myself, they were committing the harmless 
folly of taking mental possession of the scene before 
them. 

It is the same good-nature that leads me to violate 
the instinct of monopoly, and proclaim that Eome in 
May is worth waiting for. I have just been so gratified 
at finding myself in undisturbed possession for a couple 
of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can 
afford to be magnanimous. And yet I keep within the 
bounds of reason when I say that it would be hard as 
a traveller or student to pass pleasanter days than 
these. The weather for a month has been perfect, the 
sky magnificently blue, the air lively enough, the nights 
cool, too cool, and the whole gray old city illumined 
with the most irresistible smile. Eome, which in some 
moods, especially to new-comers, seems a terribly 
gloomy place, gives on the whole, and as one knows it 
better, an indefinable impression of gayety. This con- 
tagious influence lurks in all its darkness and dirt and 
decay — a something more careless and hopeless than 
our thrifty N'orthern cheerfulness, and yet more genial, 
more urbane, than mere indifference. The Eoman tem- 
per is a healthy and happy one, and you feel it abroad 
in the streets even when the sirocco blows, and the 
goal of man's life assumes a horrible identity with the 
mouth of a furnace. But who can analyze even the 
simplest Eoman impression ? It is compounded of so 



THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME. 183 

many things, it says so mncli, it suggests so much, it so 
quickens the intellect and so flatters the heart, that 
before we are fairly conscious of it the imagination has 
marked it for her own, and exposed us to a perilous 
likelihood of talking nonsense about it. 

The smile of Eome, as I have called it, and its in- 
tense suggestiveness to those who are willing to ramble 
irresponsibly and take things as they come, is ushered 
in with the first breath of spring, and it grows and 
grows with the advancing season, till it wraps the 
whole place in its tenfold charm. As the process 
goes on, you can do few better things than go often to 
the Villa Borghese, and sit on the grass (on a stout bit 
of drapery) and watch its exquisite stages. It is a 
more magical spring than ours, even when ours has left 
off its damnable faces and begun. Nature surrenders 
herself to it with a frankness which outstrips your most 
unutterable longings, and leaves you, as I say, nothing 
to do but to lay your head among the anemones at the 
base of a high-stemmed pine, and gaze up crestward 
and skyward along its slanting silvery column. You 
may look at the spring in Eome from a dozen of these 
choice standpoints, and have a different villa for your 
observations every day in the week. The Doria, the 
Ludovisi, the Medici, the Albani, the Wolkonski, the 
Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo — there are more of 
them, with all their sights, and sounds, and odors, and 
memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none 
of them to the Borghese, which is free to all the world 
at all times, and yet never crowded ; for when the whirl 
of carriages is great in the middle regions, you may 



184 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, ten- 
anted at the worst by a group of those long-skirted 
young Propagandists who stalk about with solemn 
angularity, each with a book under his arm, like sil- 
houettes from a mediaeval missal, and " compose " so 
extremely well with the picturesqueness of cypresses, 
and of stretches of golden-russet wall overtopped by 
the intense blue sky. And yet if the Borghese is good, 
the Medici is strangely charming ; and you may stand 
in the little belvedere which rises with such surpassing 
oddity out of the dusky heart of the Boschetto at the 
latter establishment — a miniature presentation of the 
wood of the Sleeping Beauty — and look across at the 
Ludovisi pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky 
of what a painter would call the most morbid blue, and 
declare that the place where they grow is the most de- 
lightful in the world. The Villa Ludovisi has been all 
winter the residence of the lady familiarly known in 
Eoman society as " Eosina," the king's morganatic wife. 
But this, apparently, is the only familiarity which she 
allows, for the grounds of the villa have been rigidly 
closed, to the inconsolable regret of old Eoman sojourn- 
ers. But just as the nightingales began to sing, the 
august ^ac?ro7^a departed, and the public, with certain 
restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. It is a 
really princely place, and there could be no better ex- 
ample of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege 
than the fact of its whole vast extent falling within 
the city walls. It has in this respect very much the 
same sort of impressiveness as the great intramural 
demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford. The stern 



THE AFTEE-SEASON IN ROME. 185 

old ramparts of Eome form the outer enclosure of the 
villa, and hence a series of picturesque effects which it 
would be unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. 
The grounds are laid out in the formal last-century 
manner ; but nowhere do the straight black cypresses 
lead off the gaze into vistas of a more Active sort of 
melancholy ; nowhere are there grander, smoother walls 
of laurel and myrtle. 

I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Prot- 
estant cemetery close to St. Paul's Gate, where the 
ancient and the modern world are most impressively 
contrasted. They make between them one of the sol- 
emn places of Eome — although, indeed, when funereal 
things are so interfused with picturesqueness, it seems 
ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears 
and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses 
and radiant sky, which almost tempts one to fancy one 
is looking back at death from the brighter side of the 
grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city 
wall, and the older graves are sheltered by a mass of 
ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you 
may peep at the purple landscape of the Campagna. 
Shelley's grave is here, buried in roses — a happy 
grave every way for a poet who was personally poetic. 
It is impossible to imagine anything more impenetrably 
tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the pro- 
tecting rampart. You seem to see a cluster of modern 
ashes held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. 
The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyra- 
mid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within 
the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid 



186 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

blue of the sky, and casting its pagan shadow upon the 
grass of English graves — that of Keats, among others 

— with a certain poetic justice. It is a wonderful con- 
fusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of 
our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But 
to my sense, the most touching thing there is the look 
of the pious English inscriptions among all these Eo- 
man memories. There is something extremely appeal- 
ing in their universal expression of that worst of trouble 

— trouble in a foreign land ; but something that stirs 
the heart even more deeply is the fine Scriptural lan- 
guage in which everything is recorded. The echoes of 
massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged 
suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I 
may seem unduly sentimental ; but I confess that the 
charge to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, 
who was drowned in the Tiber in 1824 : " If thou art 
young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies 
beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever 
cropt in its bloom " — seemed to me irresistibly a case 
for tears. The whole elaborate inscription, indeed, was 
curiously suggestive. The English have the reputation 
of being the most reticent people in the world, and, as 
there is no smoke without fire, I suppose they have 
done something to deserve it ; but for my own part, I 
am forever meeting the most startling examples of the 
insular faculty to " gush." In this instance the mother 
of the deceased takes the public into her confidence 
with surprising frankness, omits no detail, and em- 
braces the opportunity to mention by the way that she 
had already lost her husband by a most mysterious 



THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME. 187 

death. Yet the whole elaborate record is profoundly 
touching. It has an air of old-fashioned gentility 
which makes its frankness tragic. You seem to hear 
the garrulity of passionate grief. 

To be choosing this well-worn picturesqueness for a 
theme, when there are matters of modern moment going 
on in Eome, may seem to demand some apology. But 
I can make no claim to your special correspondent's 
faculty for getting an " inside view " of things, and I 
have hardly more than a picturesque impression of the 
Pope's illness and of the discussion of the Law of the 
Convents. Indeed, I am afraid to speak of the Pope's 
illness at all, lest I should say something egregiously 
heartless about it, and recall too forcibly that unnatural 
husband who was heard to wish that his wife would 
get well or — something ! He had his reasons, and 
Eoman tourists have theirs in the shape of a vague 
longing for something spectacular at St. Peter's. If it 
takes a funeral to produce it, a funeral let it be. 
Meanwhile, we have been having a glimpse of the 
spectacular side of the Eeligious Corporations Bill. 
Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the Corso, I 
stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred 
men were strolling slowly down the street with their 
hands in their pockets, shouting in unison, "Abbasso 
il ministero ! " and huzzaing in chorus. Just beneath 
my window they stopped and began to murmur, " Al 
Quirinale, al Quirinale ! " The crowd surged a moment 
gently, and then drifted to the Quirinal, where it scuf- 
fled harmlessly with half a dozen of the king's soldiers. 
It ought to have been impressive, for what was it. 



188 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

essentially, but the seeds of revolution ? But its car- 
riage was too gentle and its cries too musical to send 
the most timorous tourist to packing his trunk. As I 
began with saying : in Eome, in May, everything has 
an amiable side, even emeutes I 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 

DECEMBER 28, 1872. — In Eome again for the 
last three days — that second visit, which, if the 
first is not followed by a fatal illness in Florence, the 
story goes that one is doomed to pay. I did n't drink 
of the Fountain of Trevi when I was here before ; but 
I feel as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself Neverthe- 
less, as I drove from the station in the evening, I won- 
dered what I should think of Eome at this first glimpse 
if I did n't know it. All manner of evil, I am afraid. 
Paris, as I passed along the Boulevards three evenings 
before, to take the train, was swarming and glittering 
as befits a great capital. Here, in the black, narrow, 
crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing for a city to build 
an eternity upon. But there were new gas-lamps round 
the spouting Triton in the Piazza Barberini and a news- 
paper stall on the corner of the Condotti and the Corso 
— salient signs that Eome had become a capital. An 
hour later I walked up to the Via Gregoriana by the 
Piazza di Spagna. It was all silent and deserted, and 
the great flight of steps looked surprisingly small. 
Everything seemed meagre, dusky, provincial. Could 
Eome, after all, be such an entertaining place ! That 



190 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

queer old rococo garden gateway at the top of the Gre- 
goriana stirred an old memory; it awoke into a con- 
sciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very 
soon, in a little crimson drawing-room, I concluded that 

Eome was pleasant enough Everything is dear 

(in the way of lodgings) but it hardly matters, as 
everything is taken and some one else is paying for it. 
I must make up my mind to be but half comfortable. 
But it seems a shame here to care for one's comfort or 
to be perplexed by the economical side of life. The 
intellectual side is so intense that you feel as if you 
ought to live on the mere atmosphere — the historic 
whisperings, the nameless romantic intimations. Liter- 
ally, what an atmosphere it is ! The weather is perfect, 
the sky as blue as the most exploded tradition fames 
it, the whole air glowing and throbbing with lovely 

color Paris glitters with gaslight ! And oh, the 

monotonous miles of rain- washed asphalte ! 

December 30th. — I have had nothing to do with the 
" ceremonies." In fact, I believe there have hardly been 
any — no midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver 
trumpets at St. Peter's. Everything is remorselessly 
clipped and curtailed — the Vatican in mourning. But 
I saw it in its superbest scarlet in '69 I went yes- 
terday with L. to the Colonna gardens — an adventure 
which would have reconverted me to Eome if the thing 
were not already done. It 's a rare old place — rising 
in mouldy, bosky terraces, and mossy stairways, and 
winding walks, from the back of the palace to the top 
of the Quirinal. It 's the grand style of gardening, and 
resembles the present natural manner as a chapter of 



FROM A EOMAN NOTE-BOOK. 191 

Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever con- 
temporary prose. But it 's a better style in horticulture 
than in literature ; I prefer one of the long-drawn blue- 
green Colonna vistas, with a maimed and mossy-coated 
garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quota- 
tion from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing 
there is the old orangery with its trees in fantastic terra- 
cotta tubs. The late afternoon light was gilding the 
monstrous jars and suspending golden checkers among 
the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing 
is the broad terrace with its mossy balustrade, and its 
benches, and its ruin of the great naked Torre di N'erone 
(I think) which might look stupid if its rosy brick- 
work did n't take such a color in the blue air. It 's a 
very good thing, at any rate, to stroll and talk there in 
the afternoon sunshine. 

January 2d, 1873. — Two or three drives with A. 
To St. Paul's out of the Walls and back by a couple 
of old churches on the Aventine. I was freshly struck 
with the rare picturesqueness of the little Protestant 
cemetery at the gate, lying in the shadow of the black, 
sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing black cy- 
presses. Bathed in the clear Eoman light, the place 
seems intensely funereal. I don't know whether it 
should make one in love with death to lie there ; it 
certainly makes death seem terribly irrevocable. The 
weight of a tremendous past appears to press upon the 
flowery sod, and the sleeper's mortality feels the con- 
tact of all the mortality with which the brilliant air is 
tainted. . . . The restored Basilica is incredibly splendid. 
It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, 



192 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

and there are few more striking emblems of later Eome 
— the Eome foredoomed to see Victor Emanuel in the 
Quirinal, the Eome of abortive councils and unheeded 
anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its 
miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado, like 
a florid advertisement of the superabundance of faith. 
Within, it is magnificent, and its magnificence has no 
shabby spots — a rare thing in Eome. Marble and 
mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, in- 
crust it from pavement to cornice, and flash back their 
polished lights at each other with such a splendor of 
effect that you seem to stand at the heart of some im- 
mense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to 
know marbles and love them. I remember the fascina- 
tion of the first great show of them I saw at Venice — 
at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Color has in no other form 
so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of 
tone and hardness of substance — is not that the sum 
of the artist's desire ? G., with his beautiful, caressing, 
open-lipped Eoman utterance, which is so easy to under- 
stand, and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of Latin, 
urged upon us the charms of a return by the Aventine, 
to see a couple of old churches. The best is Santa 
Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth century, 
mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own 
antiquity. What a massive heritage Christianity and 
Catholicism are leaving here ! What a substantial fact, 
in all its decay, is this memorial Christian temple, out- 
living its uses among the sunny gardens and vineyards ! 
It has a noble nave, filled with a stale smell which (like 
that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes, and bor- 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 193 

dered with twenty-four fluted marble columns of Pagan 
origin. The crudely primitive little mosaics along the 
entablature are extremely curious. A Dominican monk; 
still young, who showed us the chiJrch, seemed a crea- 
ture generated from its musty shadows and odors. His 
physiognomy was wonderfully de Vemploi, and his voice, 
which was most agreeable, had the strangest jaded 
humility. His lugubrious salute and sanctimonious 
impersonal appropriation of my departing franc would 
have been a master-touch on the stage. While we were 
still in the church a bell rang which he had to go and 
answer, and as he came back and approached us along 
the nave, he made with his white gown and hood and 
his cadaverous face, against the dark church background, 
one of those pictures which, thank the Muses, have not 
yet been reformed out of Italy. It was strangely like 
the mental pictures suggested in reading certain plays 
and poems. We got back into the carriage and talked 
of profane things, and went home to dinner — drifting 
recklessly, it seemed to me, from aesthetic luxury to 
social. 

On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service 
at the Gesu — hitherto done so splendidly before the 
Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it was eloquent 
of change — no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent 
music ; but a great picturesqueness, nevertheless. The 
church is gorgeous ; late Eenaissance, of great propor- 
tions, and full, like so many others, but in a pre-eminent 
degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Eomanism. 
It does not impress the imagination, but it keenly irri- 
tates the curiosity ; suggests no legends, but innumera- 

9 M 



194 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

ble anecdotes, a la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, 
filled with a florid concave fresco of tumbling, foreshort- 
ened angels, and all over the ceilings and cornices there 
is a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings and mouldings. 
There are various Bernini saints and seraphs in stucco- 
sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing 
against their rusty machinery of coppery nimbi and 
egg-shaped cloudlets. Marble, damask, and tapers in 
gorgeous profusion. The high altar a great screen of 
twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched in a little 
loft high up in the right transept, like a balcony in a 
side-scene at the opera, and indulging in surprising 

roulades and flourishes Near me sat a handsome, 

opulent-looking nun — possibly an abbess or prioress 
of noble lineage. Can a gentle prioress listen to a fine 
operatic barytone in such a sumptuous temple, and re- 
ceive none but ascetic impressions ? What a cross-fire 
of influences does Catholicism provide ! 

January 4th. — A drive with A. out of the Porta 
San Giovanni, along the Yia Appia ISTuova. More and 
more beautiful as you get well away from the walls, and 
the great view opens out before you — the rolling green- 
brown dells and flats of the Campagna, the long, dis- 
jointed arcade of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed 
blue of the Alban Mountains, touched into pale lights 
by their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined 
basilica of San Stefano, an affair of the fifth century, 
rather meaningless without a learned companion. But 
the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the Pancratii, 
disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale — in 
their hardly dimmed frescos, their beautiful sculptured 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 195 

coffin, and great sepulchral slab. Better still is the 
tomb of the Valerii adjoining it, — a single chamber 
with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings, 
perfectly intact, exquisite figures and arabesques, as 
sharp and delicate as if the plasterer's scaffold had just 
been taken from under them. Strange enough to think 
of these things — so many of them as there are — sur- 
viving their long earthly obscuration in this perfect 
shape, and coming up like long-lost divers from the 
sea of time. 

lUh. — A delightful walk last Sunday with Z. to 
Monte Mario. We drove to the Porta Angelica, the 
little gate hidden behind the right wing of Bernini's 
colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to 
the Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants 
huddled under the wall in the sun admits you for half 
a franc into the finest old ilex-walk in Italy. (As fine 
there may be, but not a finer.) It is all vaulted gray- 
gTeen shade, with blue Campagna stretches in the inter- 
stices. The day was perfect. The still sunshine, as we 
sat at the twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have 
the drowsy ham of midsummer. The charm of Italian 
vegetation is something indefinable. In a certain cheap- 
ness and thinness of substance (as compared with the 
English) it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively 
dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt 
of many unimaginative Britons. But it has a kind of 
idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness 
and dishevelment which appeals to one's tenderest per- 
ceptions. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely 
pine which " tells " so in the landscape from other 



196 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

points, bought off from destruction by (I believe) Lord 
Beaumont. He, at least, was not an unimaginative 
Briton. As you stand under it, its far-away, shallow 
dome, supported on a single column almost white 
enough to be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest 
depths of the blue. Its pale gray-blue boughs and its 
silvery stem make a wonderful harmony with the ambi- 
ent air. The Villa Mellini is full of the elder Italy of 
one's imagination — the Italy of Boccaccio. There are 
twenty places where his story-tellers might have sat 
round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath 
the overcrowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as 
well, but not in Boccaccio's velvet — a row of ragged 
and livid contadini ; some simply stupid in their squa- 
lor, but some good square brigands of romance (or of 
reality) with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes. 

A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance' 
sake over to San Onofrio. The approach is one of the 
dirtiest adventures in Eome, and though the view is 
fine from the little terrace, the church and convent are 
of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here — almost 
like pearls in a dunghill — are hidden mementos of 
two of the most exquisite of Italian minds. Torquato 
Tasso spent the last months of his life here, and I saw 
his room and various warped and faded relics. The 
most interesting is a cast of his face, taken after death 
— looking, like all such casts, very gallant and distin- 
guished. But who should look so if not he ? In a 
little shabby, chilly corridor adjoining is a fresco of 
Leonardo, a Virgin and Child, with the donatorio. It 
is very small, simple, and faded, but it has all the 



FROM A ROxMAN NOTE-BOOK. 197 

artist's magic. •It has that mocking, illusive refine- 
ment, that hint of a vague arriere-pensee, which marks 
every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it the perfection 
of irony or the perfection of tenderness ? What does 
he mean, what does he affirm, what does he deny ? 
Magic would not be magic if we could explain it. As 
I glanced from the picture to the poor, stupid little 
red-faced brother at my side, I fancied it might pass 
for an elegant epigram on monasticism. Certainly, at 
any rate, there is more mind in it than under all the 
monkish tonsures it has seen coming and going these 
three hundred years. 

21st. — The last three or four days I have regularly 
spent a couple of hours from noon baking myself in 
the sun, on the Pincio, to get rid of a cold. The 
weather perfect and the crowd (especially to-day) amaz- 
ing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd t 
Who does the vulgar, stay-at-home work of Eome ? 
All the grandees and half the foreigners are there in 
their carriages ; the lourgeoisie on foot, staring at them, 
and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great 
difference between public places in America and Eu- 
rope is in the number of unoccupied people, of every 
age and condition, sitting about, early and late, on 
benches, and gazing at you, from your hat to your 
boots, as you pass. Europe is certainly the continent 
of staring. The ladies on the Pincio have to run the 
gantlet ; but they seem to do so complacently enough. 
The European woman is brought up to the sense of 
having a definite part (in the way of manners) to play 
in public. To lie back in a barouche alone, balancing 



198 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

a parasol, and seeming to ignore the extremely imme- 
diate gaze of two serried ranks of male creatures on 
each side of her path, save here and there to recognize 
one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her 
daily duties. The number of young men here who lead 
a purely contemplative life is enormous. They muster 
in especial force on the Pincio, but the Corso all day 
is thronged with them. They are well dressed, good- 
humored, good-looking, polite ; but they seem never to 
do a harder stroke of work than to stroll from the 
Piazza Colonna to the Hotel de Eome, or vice versa. 
Some of them don't even stroll, but stand leaning by 
the hour against the doorw^ays, sucking the knobs of 
their canes, feeling their back hair, and settling their 
shirt-cuffs. At my cafe in the morning several stroll 
in, already (at nine o'clock) in light gloves. But they 
order nothing, turn on their heels, glance at the mirrors, 
and stroll out again. When it rains they herd under 
the portes-cocheres and in the smaller cafes Yes- 
terday Prince Humbert's little primogenito was on the 
Pincio in an open landau, with his governess. He is a 
sturdy, blond little fellow, and the image of the King. 
They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd 
v^as planted about the carriage- wheels, staring and crit- 
icising under the child's snub little nose. It seemed to 
be bold, cynical curiosity, without the slightest man- 
ifestation of " loyalty," and it gave me a singular sense 
of the vulgarization of Eome under the new regime. 
When the Pope drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle ; 
even if you neither kneeled nor uncovered, you w^ere 
irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 199 

listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, 
under the charge of superior nurse-maids, whom you 
might take liberties v/ith. The family at the Quirinal 
make something of a merit, I believe, of their modest 
and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great ; but, 
picturesquely, what a change for the worse from a dis- 
pensation which proclaimed stateliness as a part of its 
essence ! The divinity that doth hedge a king is pretty 
well on the wane apparently. But how many more 
fine old traditions will the extremely sentimental travel- 
ler miss in the Italians over whom that little jostled 
prince in the landau will have come into his kinghood ? 
.... The Pincio has a great charm ; it is a great re- 
source. I am forever being reminded of the " aesthetic 
luxury," as I called it above, of living in Eome. To 
be able to choose of an afternoon for a lounge (respect- 
fully speaking) between St. Peter's and the Pincio 
(counting nothing else) is a proof that if in Eome you 
may suffer from ennui, at least your ennui has a throb- 
bing soul in it. It is something to say for the Pincio 
that you don't always choose St. Peter's. Sometimes 
I lose patience with its air of eternal idleness ; but at 
others this very idleness is balm to one's conscience. 
Life on just these terms seems so easy, so monotonously 
sweet, that you feel as if it would be unwise, really 
unsafe, to change. The Eoman atmosphere is distinctly 
demoralizing. 

26^A. — With X. to the Villa Medici — perhaps on 
the whole the most enchanting place in Eome. The part 
of the garden called the Boschetto has a kind of incred- 
ible, impossible charm ; an upper terrace, behind locked 



200 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen 
oaks. Such a deliciously dim light — such a soft suffu- 
sion of tender, gray-green tones — such a company of 
gnarled and twisted little miniature trunks — dwarfs 
playing with each other at being giants — and such 
a shower of golden sparkles playing in from the glow- 
ing west 1 At the end of the wood is a steep, circular 
mound, up which the little trees scramble amain, with 
a long, mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. 
This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk, to 
you don't see where, is delightfully fantastic. You ex- 
pect to see an old woman in a crimson petticoat, with 
a distaff, come hobbling down and turn into a fairy, 
and offer you three wishes. I should wish one was 
not obliged to be a Frenchman to come and live and 
dream and work at the Academic de France. Can 
there be for a while a happier destiny than that of 
a young artist, conscious of talent, with no errand but 
to educate, polish, and perfect it, transplanted to these 
sacred shades ? One has fancied Plato's Academy — 
his gleaming colonnades, his blooming gardens and 
Athenian sky ; but was it as good as this one, where 

Monsieur does the Platonic ? The blessing in 

Eome is not that this or that or the other isolated 
object is so very unsurpassable ; but that the general 
atmosphere is so pictorial, so prolific of impressions 
which you long to make a note of. And from the 
general atmosphere the Villa Medici has distilled an 
essence of its own — walled it in and made it delight- 
fully private. The great facade on the gardens is like 
an enormous rococo clock-face, all incrusted with im- 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-ROOK. 201 

ages and arabesques and tablets. What mornings and 
afternoons one might spend there, brush in hand, un- 
preoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satisfied, resolv- 
ing golden lights and silver shadows into imaginative 
masterpieces ! 

At a later date — middle of March. — A ride with 
X. out of the Porta Pia to the meadows beyond the 
Ponte Nomentana — close to the site of Phaon's villa 
where Nero, in hiding, had himself stp,bbed. It was 
deeply delightful — more so than now one can really 
know or say. For these are predestined memories and 
the stuff that regrets are made of; the mild divine 
efflorescence of spring, the wonderful landscape, the 

talk suspended for another gallop Eeturning, 

we dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and 
walked through the twilight of the vaguely perfumed, 
bird-haunted alleys to H.'s studio, hidden in the wood 
like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent there a charming 
half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures 
while X. discoursed of her errand. The studio is small 
and more like a little salon ; the painting refined, im- 
aginative, somewhat morbid, full of consummate French 
ability. A portrait, idealized and etherealized, but a 

likeness of Mme. de (from last year's Salon) in 

white satin, quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds, and 
pearls — a wonderful combination of brilliant silvery 
tones. A " Femme Sauvage," a naked dusky girl in a' 
wood with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, passionate 

eyes H. is different enough from the American 

artists. They may be producers, but he is a product as 
well — a product of influences that do not touch us. 

9* 



202 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

One of them is his spending his days, his years, work- 
ing away in that unprofessional-looking little studio, 
with his enchanted wood on one side and the plunging 
wall of Eome on the other. 

January 30th. — A drive the other day with X. to 
the Villa Madam a, on the side of Monte Mario ; a place 
like a page out of Browning, wonderful in its haunt- 
ing melancholy. What a grim commentary such a 
place is on history — what an irony of the past ! The 
road up to it through the outer enclosure is almost 
impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a 
terrace, rises the once elegant Casino, with hardly a 
whole pane of glass in its facade, gloomy with its sal- 
low stucco and degraded ornaments. The front away 
from Eome has in the basement a great loggia, now 
walled in from the weather, preceded by a grassy, be- 
littered platform, with an immense sweeping view of 
the Campagna ; the sad-looking — more than sad-look- 
ing, evil-looking — Tiber beneath (the color of gold, the 
sentimentalists say ; the color of mustard, the realists) ; 
a great vague stretch beyond, of various complexions 
and uses ; and on the horizon the lovely iridescent 
mountains. The place is turned into a very shabby 
farm-house, with muddy water in the old pieces d'eau 
and dunghills on the old parterres. The " feature " is 
the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls 
decorated by Giulio Eomano ; exquisite stucco-work 
and still brilliant frescos ; arabesques and figurines ; 
nymphs and fauns, animals and flowers — gracefully 
lavish designs of every sort. Much of the color — 
especially the blues — is still almost vivid, and all the 



FKOM A EOMAN NOTE-BOOK. 203 

work is wonderfully ingenious, elegant, and charming. 
Apartments so decorated can have been meant only 
for the recreation of great people — people for whom 
life was impudent ease and success. Margaret Farnese 
was the lady of the house, but where she trailed her 
cloth of gold the chickens now scamper between your 
legs over rotten straw. It is all inexpressibly dreary. 
A stupid peasant scratching his head, a couple of criti- 
cal Americans picking their steps, the walls tattered 
and befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking 
in on your heart, and the scene overbowed by these 
heavenly frescos, mouldering there in their airy art- 
istry ! It 's poignant ; it provokes tears ; it tells so of 
the waste of effort. Something human seems to pant 
beneath the gray pall of time and to implore you to 
rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it, somehow. But you 
leave it to its lingering death without compunction, 
almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely 
crime-haunted — paying at least the penalty of some 
hard immorality. The end of a Eenaissance casino ! 
The didactic observer may take it as a symbol of the 
eventual destiny of the House of Pleasure. 

February 12th. — Yesterday to the Villa Albani. 
Over-formal and (as my companion says) too much 
like a tea-garden ; but with beautiful stairs and splen- 
did geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected 
with long pedestals supporting little antique busts. 
The light to-day was magnificent ; the Alban Moun- 
tains of an intenser broken purple than I have ever 
seen them — their white towns blooming upon it like 
vague projected lights. It was like a piece of very 



204 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

modern painting, and a good example of how Nature 
has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make 
us careful how we condemn out of hand the more re- 
fined and affected artists. The collection of marbles in 
the Casino (Winckelmann's) admirable, and to be seen 
again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus, a 
strangely beautiful and impressive thing. One sees 
something every now and then which makes one de- 
clare that the Greek manner, even for purely romantic 
and imaginative effects, surpasses any that has since 
been invented. If there is not imagination in the bale- 
ful beauty of that perfect young profile, there is none 
in Hamlet or in Lycidas. There is five hundred times 
as much as in the " Transfiguration." At any rate, 
with this to point to, it is not for sculpture to confess 
to an inability to produce any emotion that painting 
can. There are numbers of small and delicate frag- 
ments of bas-reliefs of exquisite beauty, and a huge 
piece (tAvo combatants — one, on horseback, beating 
down another — murder made eternal and beautiful) 
attributed to the Parthenon, and certainly as grandly 
impressive as anything in the Elgin marbles. X. sug- 
gested again the Eoman villas as a "subject." Excel- 
lent, if one could find a feast of facts, a la Stendhal. A 
lot of vague picturesque talk would not at all pay. 
There 's been too much already. Enough facts are re- 
corded, I suppose ; one should discover them and soak 
in them for a twelvemonth. And yet a Eoman villa, 
in spite of statues, ideas, and atmosphere, seems to me 
to have less of human and social suggestiveness, a 
shorter, lighter reverberation, than an old English 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 205 

country-house, round which experience seems piled so 
thick. But this perhaps is hair-splitting. 

March 9th. — The Vatican is still deadly cold ; a 
couple of hours there yesterday with Mr. E. Yet he, 
enviable man, fresh from the East, had no overcoat and 
wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would be to live 
in Eome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican 
seems very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. 
I never lost the sense before of confusing vastness. 
Sancta simplicitas ! But all my old friends stand there 
in undimmed radiance, keeping, most of them, their old 
pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the 
enormous amount of padding, — the number of third 
and fourth rate statues which weary the eye that would 
fain approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In 
spite of the padding, there are dozens of things that one 
passes regretfully ; but the impression of the whole 
place is the great thing — the feeling that through 
these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable 
part of our present conception of Beauty. 

April 10th. — I went last night, in the rain, to Valle, 
to see a comedy of Goldoni, in Venetian dialect — "I 
Quattro Rustighi." I could not half follow it ; enough, 
however, to suspect that, with all its fun, it was not so 
good as Moliere. The acting was capital — broad, free, 
and natural; the dialogue more conversational even 
than life itself ; but, like all the Italian acting I have 
seen, it was wanting in finesse and culture. I con- 
trasted the affair with the evening in December last 
that I walked over (also in the rain) to the Odcon and 
saw the "Plaideurs" and the "Malade Imaoinaire." 



206 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

There, too, was hardly more than a handful of specta- 
tors ; but what rich, ripe, picturesque, intellectual com- 
edy ! and what polished, educated playing ! These 
Italians, however, have a marvellous entrain of their 
own; they seem even less than the French to recite. 
Some of the women — ugly, with red hands and shab- 
by dresses — have an extraordinary faculty of natural 
utterance — of seeming to invent joyously as they go. 

Later. — Last evening in 's box at the Apollo 

to hear Ernesto Eossi in Othello. He shares su- 
premacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy. Beautiful 
great theatre, with boxes you can walk about in ; bril- 
liant audience. The Princess Margaret was there (I 
have never been to the theatre that she was not), and 
a number of other princesses in neighboring boxes. 

came in and instructed us that they were the 

M., the L., the P., etc. Eossi is both very bad and 
very good ; bad where anything like taste and discre- 
tion is required, but quite tremendous in violent pas- 
sion. The last act was really moving — as it could 
not well help being. The interesting thing to me was 
to observe the Italian conception of the part — to see 
how crude it was, how little it expressed the hero's 
moral side, his depth, his dignity — anything more 
than his being a creature capable of being terrible in 
a rage. The great point was his seizing lago's head 
and whacking it half a dozen times on the floor, and 
then flinging him twenty yards away. It was wonder- 
fully done, but in the doing of it and in the evident 
relish for it in the house there seemed to me something 
unappreciative, irreflective. 



FROM A EOMAN NOTE-BOOK. 207 

April 27^A. — A morning with I., at the Villa Ln- 
dovisi, which we agreed that we should not soon forget. 
The villa now belongs to the King, who has lodged 
his morganatic wife there. There is surely nothing 
better in Eome ; nothing perhaps exactly so good. 
The grounds and gardens are immense, and the great 
rusty-red city wall stretches away behind them, and 
makes Eome seem vast without making them seem 
small. There is everything — dusky avenues, trimmed 
by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells, and 
glades and glowing pastures, and reedy fountains and 
great flowering meadows, studded with enormous slant- 
ing pines. The day was delicious, the trees were all 
one melody, the whole place seemed a revelation of 
what Italy and hereditary grandeur can do together. 
E'othing could well be more picturesque than this 
garden view of the city ramparts, lifting their fantastic 
battlements above the trees and flowers. They are all 
tapestried with vines, and made to serve as sunny 
fruit-walls — grim old defence as they once were ; now 
giving nothing but a kind of magnificent privacy. The 
sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are 
two great ones — the beautiful sitting Mars and the 
head of the great Juno, thrust into a corner behind a 
shutter. These things it is almost impossible to praise ; 

we can only mark them well and be the wiser 

If I don't praise Guercino's Aurora in the greater 
Casino, it is for another reason ; it is certainly a very 
muddy masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of a 
small low hall ; the painting is coarse, and the ceiling 
too near. Besides, it is unfair to pass straight from 



208 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

the Athenian mythology to the Bolognese. "We were 
left to roam at will through the house ; the custode 
shat us in, and went to walk in the park. The apart- 
ments were all open, and I had an opportunity to re- 
construct, from its milieu at least, the character of a 
morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate that it 
was not amiable; but I should have thought more 
highly of the lady's discrimination if she had had the 
Juno removed from behind her shutter. In such a 
house, girdled about with such a park, methinks I 
could be amiable — and perhaps discriminating, too. 
The Ludovisi Casino is small, but it seems to me that 
the perfection of a life of leisure might be led there. 
In an English house you are subject to the many small 
needs and observances — to say nothing of a red-faced 
butler, dropping his /I's. You are oppressed with com- 
fort. Here, the billiard-table is old-fashioned — per- 
haps a trifle crooked; but you have Guercino above 
your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost as good 
as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all please by their 
shape, by a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate 
ornamentation on the high concave ceilings. It seems 
as if one might live over again here some gently hos- 
pitable life of a forgotten type. If I had fifty thousand 
dollars, I should certainly buy, for mere fancy's sake, 
an Italian villa (I am told there are very good ones stil] 
to be had) with graceful old rooms, and immensely 
thick walls, and a winding stone staircase, and a view 
from the loggia on the top, as nearly as possible like 
that from the Villa Ludovisi — a view with twisted 
parasol-pines balanced high above a wooded horizon 
against a sky of faded sapphire. 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 209 

May 17th. — It was wonderful yesterday at St, 
John Lateran. The spring now has turned to perfect 
summer ; there are cascades of verdure over all the 
walls ; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the 
new grass is knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The 
winter aspect of the region about the Lateran is one of 
the best things in Eome ; the sunshine seems nowhere 
so yellow, and the lean shadows look nowhere so purple 
as on the long grassy walk to Santa Croce. But yes- 
terday I seemed to see nothing but green and blue. 
The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green ; the 
Campagna rolled away in great green billows, which 
seemed to break high about the gaunt aqueducts ; and 
the Alban Hills, which in January and February keep 
shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, 
were almost monotonously green, and had lost some of 
the fine drawing of their contours. But the sky was 
superbly blue ; everything was radiant with light and 
warmth — warmth wdiich a soft, steady breeze kept 
from being fierce. I strolled some time about the 
church, which has a grand air enough, though I don't 

seize the point of view of Miss , who told me the 

other day that she thought it vastly finer than St. 

Peter's. But on Miss 's lips this seemed a very 

pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a certain 
sombre splendor, and I like the old vaulted passage 
with its slabs and monuments behind the choir. The 
charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admiraljle 
twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charm- 
ing than yesterday. The shrubs and flowers around 
the ancient well were blooming away in the dazzling 



210 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of 
the perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like 
the sculptured rim of a precious vase. Standing out 
among the flowers, you may look up and see a section 
of the summit of the great facade of the church. The 
robed and mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by 
the ages, rose into the blue air like huge snow figures. 
I spent some time afterward at the museum of the 
Lateran, pleasantly enough, and had it quite to myself. 
It is rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls 
open out impressively, one after the other, and the wide 
spaces between the statues seem to suggest, at first, that 
each is a masterpiece. T was in the loving mood of 
one's last days in Eome, and when I had nothing else 
to admire I admired the magnificent thickness of the 
embrasures of the doors and windows. If there were 
no statues at all in the Lateran, the palace would be 
worth walking through every now and then, to keep up 
one's ideal of solid architecture. I went over to the 
Scala Santa, where there was no one but a very shabby 
priest, sitting like a ticket-taker at the door. But he 
let me pass, and I ascended one of the profane lateral 
stairw^ays, and treated myself to a glimpse of the Sancta 
Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but once or twice 
a year, I believe, by three or four of the most exalted 
divines, but you may look into it freely enough through 
a couple of gilded lattices. It is very sombre and 
splendid, and looks indeed like a very holy place. 
And yet, somehow, it suggested irreverent thoughts ; it 
had, to my fancy — perhaps on account of the lattice 
— a kind of Oriental, of Mahometan air. I expected 



FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK. 211 

every moment to see a sultana come in, in a silver 
veil, and sit down in her silken trousers on the crim- 
son carpet. 

Farewells, packing, etc One would like, after 

five months in Eome, to be able to make some general 
statement of one's experience, one's gains. It is not 
easy. One has the sense of a kind of passion for the 
place, and of a large number of gathered impressions. 
Many of these have been intense, momentous, but one 
has trodden on the other, and one can hardly say what 
has become of them. They store themselves noiselessly 
away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory, 
and we live in an insistent faith that they will emerge 
into vivid relief if life or art should demand them. 
As for the passion, we need n't trouble ourselves about 
that. Sooner or later it will be sure to bring us back ! 



A CHAIN OP CITIES. 

ONE day in midwinter, some years since, during a 
transit from Eome to Florence too rapid to admit 
of much wayside dalliance with the picturesque, I waited 
for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll far 
enough from the station to have a look at the famous 
old bridge of Augustus, broken short in mid-Tiber. 
While I stood observing, the measure of enjoyment was 
filled up by the unbargained spectacle of a white-cowled 
monk trudging up a road which wound into the gate of 
the town. The little town stood on a hill, a good space 
away, boxed in behind its perfect gray wall, and the 
monk crept slowly along and disappeared within the 
aperture. Everything was distinct in the clear air, and 
the view was like a bit of background in a Perugino. 
The winter is bare and brown enough in Southern 
Italy, and the earth has even a shabbier aspect than 
with ourselves, with whom the dark side of the year 
has a robust self-assurance which enables one to regard 
it very much as a fine nude statue. But the winter 
atmosphere in these regions has often an extraordinary 
charm ; it seems to smile with a tender sense of being 
sole heir to the duty of cheering man's heart. It gave 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 213 

such a charm to the broken bridge, the little walled 
town, and the trudging friar, that I turned away with 
an impatient vow that in some blessed springtime of 
the future I would take the journey again and pause to 
my heart's content at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, at 
Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we have generally 
to clip our vows a little when we come to fulfil them ; 
and so it befell that when my blessed springtime arrived, 
I had to begin resignedly at Assisi. 

I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which 
it often lacks, if we always did things when we want 
to ; for we can answer too little for future moods. 
Winter, at least, seemed to me to have put something 
into these mediseval cities which the May sun had 
melted away — a certain delectable depth of local color, 
an excess of duskiness and decay. Assisi, in the Janu- 
ary twilight, looked like a vignette out of some brown 
old missal. But you '11 have to be a fearless explorer 
now to find of a fine spring day a quaint Italian town 
which does not primarily seem simply the submissive 
correlative of Mr. Baedeker's polyglot word-pictures. 
This great man was at Assisi in force, and a brand-new 
inn for his accommodation has just been opened cheek 
by jowl with the church of Saint Francis. I don't 
know that even its dire discomfort makes it seem less 
impertinent ; but I confess I stayed there, and the great 
view seemed hardly less beautiful from my window than 
from the gallery of the convent. It embraces the whole 
wide plain of Umbria, which, as twilight deepens, be- 
comes an enchanting counterfeit of the misty sea. The 
traveller's first errand is with the church ; and it is fair, 



214 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

furthermore, to admit that when he has crossed the 
threshold, the position and the quality of his inn cease 
for the time to be matters of moment. This double 
temple of Saint Francis is one of the very sacred places 
of Italy, and it is hard to fancy a church with an 
intenser look of sanctity. It seems especially solemn 
if you have just come from Eome, where everything 
ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so very much of this world 
— so florid, so elegant, so full of profane suggestiveness. 
Its position is superb, and they were brave builders who 
laid its foundation-stones. It rises straight from a 
steep mountain-side and plunges forward on its great 
substructure of arches, like a headland frowning over 
the sea. Before it stretches a long, grassy piazza, at the 
end of which you look along a little gray street, and see 
it climb a little way the rest of the hill, and then pause 
and leave a broad green slope, crowned, high in the air, 
with a ruined castle. When I say before it, I mean 
before the upper church; for by way of doing some- 
thing supremely handsome and impressive, the sturdy 
architects of the thirteenth century piled temple upon 
temple, and bequeathed a double version of their idea. 
One may fancy them to have intended perhaps an archi- 
tectural image of the relation between human heart and 
head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of the 
great flight of steps which leads from the upper door, 
you seem to penetrate at last into the very heart of 
Catholicism. For the first few minutes after leaving 
the hot daylight, you see nothing but a vista of low, 
black columns, closed by the great fantastic cage which 
surrounds the altar ; the place looks like a sort of gor- 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 215 

geous cavern. With time you distinguish details, and 
become accustomed to the penetrating chill, and even 
manage to make out a few frescos ; but the general 
effect remains magnificently sombre and subterranean. 
The vaulted roof is very low and the pillars dwarfish, 
though immense in girth — as befits pillars with a 
small cathedral on top of them. The tone of the place 
is superb — the richest harmony of lurking shadows 
and dusky corners, relieved by scattered images and 
scintillations. There was little light but what came 
through the windows of the choir, over which the red 
curtains had been dropped and were beginning to glow 
with the declining sun. The choir was guarded by a 
screen, behind which half a dozen venerable voices were 
droning vespers ; but over the top of the screen came 
the heavy radiance, and played among the ornaments 
of the high fence around the shrine, and cast the shadow 
of the whole elaborate mass forward into the dusky 
nave. The gloom of the vault and the side-chapels is 
overwrought with vague frescos, most of them of Giotto 
and his school, out of which the terribly distinct little 
faces which these artists loved to draAv stare at you with 
a solemn formalism. Some of them are faded and in- 
jured, and many so ill-lighted and ill-placed that you 
can only glance at them with reverential conjecture ; the 
great group, however — four paintings by Giotto on the 
ceiling above the altar — may be examined with some 
success. Like everything of Giotto's, they deserve ex- 
amination ; but I hesitate to say that they repay it by 
raising one's spirits. He was an admirably expressive 
genius, and in the art of making an attitude unmistaka- 



216 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

ble I think he has hardly been surpassed ; it is perhaps 
this rigid exactness of posture that gives his personages 
their formidable grimness. Meagre, primitive, unde- 
veloped as he is, he seems immeasurably strong, and 
suggests that if he had lived a hundred and fifty years 
later, Michael Angelo might have found a rival. Not 
that Giotto is fond of imaginative contortions. The 
something strange that troubles and haunts in his works 
dwells in their intense reality. 

It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it 
contains an admirable primitive fresco by an artist of 
genius rarely encountered — a certain Pietro Cavallini, 
pupil of Giotto. It represents the Crucifixion; the 
three crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged 
heads of angels, with a dense crowd pressing below. 
I have never seen anything more direfully lugubrious ; 
it comes near being as impressive as Tintoretto's great 
renderings of the scene in Venice. The abject anguish 
of the crucified, and the straddling authority and bru- 
tality of the mounted guards in the foreground, are 
contrasted in a fashion worthy of a great dramatist. 
But the most poignant touch is the tragic grimaces of 
the little angelic heads, as they fall like hailstones 
through the dark air. It is genuine, realistic weeping 
that the painter has depicted, and the effect is a sin- 
gular mixture of the grotesque and the pitiful. There 
are a great many more frescos beside ; all the chapels 
on one side are lined with them ; but they are chiefly 
interesting in their general effect — as they people the 
dim recesses with startling shadows and dwarfish phan- 
toms. Before leaving the church, I lingered a long 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 217 

time near the door, for it seemed to me I should not 
soon again enjoy such a feast of chiaroscuro. The 
opposite end glowed with subdued color; the middle 
portion was vague and brown, with two or three scat- 
tered worshippers looming through the dusk ; and all 
the way down, the polished pavement with its uneven 
slabs, glittering dimly in the obstructed light, seemed 
to me the most fascinating thing in the world. It is 
certainly desirable, if one takes the lower church of 
Saint Francis to represent the human heart, that one 
should find a few bright places in it. Bat if the gen- 
eral effect is gloomy, is the symbol less valid ? For 
the contracted, passionate, prejudiced heart let it stand ! 
One thing, at all events, I can say : that I would 
give a great deal to possess as capacious, symmetrical 
and well-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary. 
Thanks to these merits, in spite of a great array of 
frescos of Giotto which have the advantao^e of beim? 
easily seen, it lacks the picturesqueness of its coun- 
terpart. The frescos, which are admirable, represent 
certain leading events in the life of Saint Francis, and 
suddenly remind you, by one of those anomalies which 
abound amid the picturesqueness of Catholicism, that 
the apostle of beggary — the saint whose only tenement 
in life was the ragged robe which barely covered him 
— is the hero of this massive structure. Church upon 
church, — nothing less will adequately shroud his con- 
secrated clay. The great reality of Giotto's designs 
increases the helpless w^onderment with which we look 
at the passionate pluck of Saint Francis — the sense 
of being separated from it by an impassable gulf — the 

10 



218 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

reflection on all that has come and gone to make ns 
forgive ourselves for not being capable of such high- 
strung virtue. An observant friend, who has lived 
long in Italy, lately declared to me that she detested 
the name of Saint Francis — she deemed him the chief 
propagator of that Italian vice which is most trying to 
those who have a kindness for the Italian character — 
the want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity 
in cleanliness, and every cringing beggar, idler, liar, 
and pilferer seemed to her to flourish under the shadow 
of this great man's unwashed sanctity. She was pos- 
sibly right ; at Eome, at Naples, at least, I would have 
admitted that she was right ; but at Assisi, face to face 
with Giotto's vivid chronicle, it is impossible to refuse 
to the painter's ascetic hero that compassionate respect 
which we feel for all men whose idea and life have 
been identical, whose doctrine was an unflinching per- 
sonal example. 

I should find it hard to give a very definite account 
of my subsequent adventures at Assisi ; for there is 
incontestably such a thing as being too good-humored 
to discriminate, too genial to be critical. One need not 
be ashamed to confess that the ultimate result of one's 
meditations at the shrine of Saint Francis was a great 
charity. My charity led me slowly up and down for a 
couple of hours through the steep little streets, and 
finally stretched itself on the grass beside me in the 
shadow of the great ruined castle which decorates so 
magnificently the eminence above the town. I remem- 
ber edging along against the sunless side of the mouldy 
little houses, and pausing very often to look at nothing 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 219 

very particular. It Avas all very hot, very still, very 
drearily antique. A wheeled vehicle at Assisi is a 
rarity, and the foreigner's interrogative tread in the 
blank sonorous lanes has the privilege of bringing the 
inhabitants to their doorways. Some of the better 
houses, however, have an air of sombre stillness which 
seems a protest against all curiosity as to what may 
happen in the nineteenth century. You may wonder, 
as you pass, what lingering old-world social types are 
vegetating there, but you will not hnd out. Yet in 
one very silent little street I had a glimpse of an open 
door which I have not forgotten. A long-haired ped- 
ler, with a tray of mass-books and rosaries, was offer- 
ing his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had 
opened the door rather stingily, and seemed to be half- 
heartedly dismissing him. But the pedler held up 
something which I could not see ; the priest wavered, 
with an air of timorous concession to profane curiosity, 
and then furtively pulled the pedler into the house. 
I should have liked to go in with the pedler. I saw 
later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored 
enough to have found entertainment in a pedler's tray. 
They were at the door of the cafe on the Piazza, and 
were so thankful to me for asking them the way to the 
cathedral that they all answered in chorus, and smiled 
as if I had done them a favor. The Piazza has a iine 
old portico of an ancient Temple of Minerva — six 
fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful proportions, 
but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, 
found it much more interesting than the miglity medi- 
aeval churcli, and Goethe, as a cicerone, doubtless could 



220 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

have persuaded you that it was so ; but in the humble 
society of Murray we shall most of us find deeper 
meanings in the church. I found some very quaint ones 
in the dark yellow facade of the small cathedral, as I 
sat on a stone bench beside the oblong green which lies 
before it. It is a very pretty piece of Italian Gothic, 
and, like several of its companions at Assisi, it has an 
elegant wheel window and a number of grotesque little 
sculptures of creatures human and bestial. If, with 
Goethe, I inclined to balance something against the 
attractions of the great church, I should choose the 
ruined castle on the hill above the town. I had been 
having glimpses of it all the afternoon at the end of 
steep street vistas, and promising myself half an hour 
beside its gray walls at sunset. The sun was very long 
setting, and my half-hour became a long lounge in the 
lee of an abutment which arrested the gentle uproar of 
the wind. The castle is a magnificent piece of ruin, 
perched upon the summit of the mountain to whose 
slope Assisi clings, and dropping a pair of stony arms 
to enclose the little town in its embrace. The city- 
wall, in other words, straggles up the steep green slope 
and meets the crumbling skeleton of the castle. On 
the side away from the town the mountain plunges 
into a deep ravine, on the other side of which rises 
the powerful undraped shoulder of Monte Subasio — a 
fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and mountain are 
wild enough, but their frown expires in the teeming 
softness of the great vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there 
on the grass, with a silver-gray castle at one's back and 
the warm rushing wind in one's ears, and watch the 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 221 

beautiful plain mellowing into the tones of twilight, 
was as exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired 
tourist's lot. 

At Perugia is an ancient castle ; but unhappily one 
must speak of it in earnest as that unconscious humor- 
ist, the classic American traveller, is found invariably 
to speak of the Coliseum : it will be a very handsome 
building when it is finished. Even Perugia is going 
the way of all Italy — straightening out her streets, 
repairing her ruins, laying her venerable ghosts. The 
castle is being completely remis a neuf — a Massachu- 
setts school-house could not suggest a briefer yesterday. 
There are shops in the basement and fresh putty on all 
the windows. The only thing proper to a castle that 
it has kept is its magnificent position and view, which 
you may enjoy from the broad platform where the 
Perugini assemble at eventide. Perugia is chiefly 
known to fame as the city of Eaphael's master ; but it 
has an even higher claim to renown, and ought to be 
set down in one's sentimental gazetteer as the City 
with the Views. The little dusky, crooked town is full 
of picturesqueness ; but the view, somehow, is ever 
present, even when your back is turned to it, or fifty 
house-walls conceal it, and you are forever rushing up 
by-streets and peeping round corners in the hope of 
catching another glimpse of it. As it stretches away 
before you in all its lovely immensity, it is altogether 
too vast and too fair to be described. You can only say, 
and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any other in the 
world. For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming 
plain and gleaming river and waving multitudinous 



222 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

mountain, vaguely dotted with pale gray cities, that, 
placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of 
Italy, your glance seems to compass the lovely land 
from sea to sea. Up the long vista of the Tiber you 
look — almost to Eome ; past Assisi, Spello, Foligno, 
Spoleto, all perched on their respective mountains and 
shining through the blue haze. To the north, to the 
east, to the west, you see a hundred variations of the 
prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two notes 
only I have made : one (I have made it over and over 
again) on the exquisite elegance of mountain forms 
and lines in Italy; — it is exactly as if there were a 
sex in mountains, and their contours and curves and 
complexions were here all of the feminine gender : 
second, on the possession of such an outlook on the 
world really going far to make a modest little city like 
Perugia a kind of aesthetic metropolis. It must deepen 
the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui. 
It performs this kindly office, at any rate, for the trav- 
eller who is overstaying his curiosity as to Perugino 
and the Etruscan relics. It continually solicits his 
eyes and his imagination, and doubles his entertain- 
ment. I spent a week in the place, and when it was 
gone, I had had enough of Perugino, but I had not 
had enough of the view. 

I should, perhaps, do the reader a service by telling 
him just how a week at Perugia may be spent. His first 
care must be not to be in a hurry — to walk everywhere, 
very slowly and very much at random, and gaze good- 
naturedly at anything his eye may happen to encounter. 
Almost everything that meets the eye has an ancient 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 223 

oddity which ekes out the general picturesqneness. He 
must look a great deal at the huge Palazzo Pubblico, 
which indeed is very well worth looking at. It masses 
itself gloomily above the narrow street to an immense 
elevation, and leads up the eye along a cliff-like sur- 
face of rugged wall, mottled with old scars and new 
repairs, to the loggia dizzily perched upon its cornice. 
He must repeat his visit to the Etruscan Gate, whose 
extreme antiquity he will need more than one visit to 
take the measure of. He must uncap to the pictu- 
resque statue of Pope Julius III., before the cathedral, 
remembering that Hawthorne fabled his Miriam to have 
given rendezvous to Kenyon at its base. Its material 
is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara are 
covered with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver- 
smith. He must bestow on Perugino's frescos in the 
Exchange, and his pictures in the University, all the 
placid contemplation they deserve. He must go to the 
theatre every evening in an orchestra chair at twenty- 
two soldi, and enjoy the curious didacticism of Amove 
senza Stima, Sever ita e Deholezza, La Societa Eqidxoca, 
and other popular specimens of contemporaneous 
Italian comedy. I shall be very much surprised if, at 
the end of a week of this varied entertainment, he does 
not confess to a sentimental attachment to Peruma. 
His strolls will abound in small picturesque chances, 
of which a dozen pencil-strokes would be a better 
memento than this vague word-sketching. From the 
hill on which the town is planted radiate a dozen ra- 
vines, down whose sides the houses slide and scramble 
with an alarming indifference to the cohesion of their 



224 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

little rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You cannot 
ramble far without emerging upon some little court or 
terrace from which you may look across a gulf of 
tangled gardens or vineyards at a cluster of serried 
black dwellings, which seem to be hollowing in their 
backs to keep their balance on its opposite edge. On 
archways and street-staircases and dark alleys boring 
through a chain of massive basements, and curving and 
climbing and plunging as they go, on the soundest 
mediaeval principles, you may feast your fill. These 
are the architectural commonplaces of Perugia. Some 
of the little streets in out-of-the-way corners always 
suggested to me a singular image. They were so 
rugged, so brown, so silent, that you would have fancied 
them passages long since hewn by the pickaxe in some 
deserted stone-quarry. The battered brown houses 
looked like sections of natural rock — none the less 
so when, across some narrow gap, I saw the glittering 
azure of the great surrounding landscape. 

But I ought not to talk of mouldy alleys or even of 
azure landscapes as if they were the chief delight of 
the eyes in this accomplished little city. In the Sala 
del Cambio, where in ancient days the money-changers 
rattled their sculptured florins and figured up their prof- 
its, you may enjoy one of the serenest artistic pleasures 
which the golden age of art has bequeathed to us. 
Bank parlors, I believe, are always luxuriously fur- 
nished, but I doubt whether even those of Messrs. 
Eothschild are decorated in as fine a taste as this little 
counting-house of a bygone fashion. Perugino was 
the artist chosen, and he did his best. He covered the 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 225 

four low walls and ceiling with Scriptural and mytho- 
logical figures of extraordinary beauty. They are ranged 
in artless attitudes around the upper half of the room 
— the sibyls, the prophets, the philosophers, the Greek 
and Eoman heroes — looking down with broad, serene 
faces, with their small mild eyes, their small sweet 
mouths, at the incongruous proceedings of a Board of 
Brokers. Had finance a very high tone in those days, 
or was genius simply very convenient, as the Irish 
say ? The great charm of the Sala del Cambio is that 
it seems to murmur a yes to both these questions. 
There was a rigid probity, it seems to say ; there was 

an abundant inspiration About the artist there 

would be much to say — more than I can attempt ; for 
he was not, I think, to an attentive observer, the very 
simple genius that he seems. He has that about him 
which leads one to say to one's self that, after all, he 
plays a proper part enough here as the patron of the 
money-changers. He is the delight of a million of 
young ladies ; but I suspect that if his works could be 
exactly analyzed, we should find in them a trifle more 
of manner than of conviction — of skill than of senti- 
ment. His portrait, painted on the wall of the Sala 
(you may see it also at Eome and Florence) might 
serve for the likeness of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, in 
Bunyan's allegory. He was fond of his glass, I believe, 
and he made his art lucrative. This tradition is not 
refuted by his portrait, and after some experience of 
his pictures, you may find an echo of it in their mo- 
notonous grace, their somewhat conscious purity. But 
I confess that Perugino, so interpreted, seems to me 

10* o 



226 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

hardly less interesting. If he was the inventor of 
what the French call la facHire, he applied his system 
with masterly skill ; he was the forerunner of a mighty 
race. After you have seen a certain number of his 
pictures, you have taken his measure. They are all 
unerring reproductions of a single primary type which 
had the good fortune to be adorably fair — to look as 
if it had freshly dawned upon a vision unsullied by 
the shadows of earth. As painter and draughtsman 
Perugino is delightful; one takes a singular pleasure 
in being able to count confidently on his unswerv- 
ing beauty of line, and untroubled harmony of color. 
Scepticism much m-ore highly developed than Perugi- 
no's would be easy to forgive, if it were as careful to 
replace one conscience by another. The spiritual con- 
science — the conscience of Giotto and Era Angelico — 
must have lurked in a corner of his genius even after 
the trick of the trade had been mastered. In the sac- 
risty of the charming church of San Pietro — a museum 
of pictures and carvings — is a row of small heads of 
saints which formerly ornamented the frame of the 
artist's Ascension, carried off by the French. It is 
almost miniature work, and as candidly devout in 
expression as it is delicious in touch. Two of the holy 
men are reading their breviaries, but with an air of 
infantine innocence which makes you feel sure that 
they are holding the book upside down. 

Between Perugia and Cortona lies Lake Thrasymene, 
where Hannibal treated the Eomans to an unwonted 
taste of disaster. The reflections it suggests are a 
proper preparation for Cortona itself, which is one of 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 227 

the most sturdily ancient of Italian towns. It must 
indeed have been a hoary old city when Hannibal and 
riarainius came to the shock of battle, and have looked 
down afar from its gray ramparts, on the contending 
swarm, with something of the philosophic composure 
befitting a survivor of Pelasgian and Etruscan revolu- 
tions. These gray ramparts are in great part still vis- 
ible, and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is 
perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I 
wound and doubled interminably over the face of the 
great hill, and still the jumbled roofs and towers of the 
arrogant little city seemed nearer to the sky than to 
the railway station. " Eather rough," Murray pro- 
nounces the local hotel ; and rough indeed it was ; it 
fairly bristled with discomfort. But the landlord was 
the best fellow in the world, and took me up into a 
rickety old loggia on the summit of his establishment 
and played showman to the wonderful panorama. I 
don't know whether my loss or my gain was greater 
that I saw Cortona through the medium of a festa. 
On the one hand the museum was closed (and in a 
certain sense the smaller and obscurer the town, the 
more I like the museum), the churches were impene- 
trably crowded, and there was not an empty stool nor 
the edge of a table at the cafe. On the other I saw — 
but this is what I saw. A part of the mountain-top is 
occupied by the church of Saint Margaret, and this was 
Saint Margaret's Day. Tlie houses pause and leave a 
grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black 
cypresses. The peasantry of the place and of the 
neighboring country had congregated in force, and were 



228 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

crowding into the cliurcli or winding np the slope. 
When I arrived, they were all kneeling or uncovered ; 
a bedizened procession, with banners and censers, bear- 
ing abroad, I believe, the relics of the saint, was re- 
entering the church. It was vastly picturesque. The 
day was superb, and the sky blazing overhead like a 
vault of deepest sapphire. The brown contadini, in no 
great costume, but decked in various small fineries of 
scarlet and yellow, made a mass of motley color in the 
high wind-stirred light. The procession chanted in the 
pious hush, and the boundless prospect melted away 
beneath us in tones of azure hardly less brilliant than 
the sky. Behind the church was an empty, crumbling 
citadel, with half a dozen old women keeping the gate 
for coppers. Here were views and breezes and sun 
and shade and grassy corners, to one's heart's content. 
I chose a spot which fairly combined all these advan- 
tages, and spent a good part of my day at Cortona, 
lying there at my length and observing the situation 
over the top of a novel of Balzac. In the afternoon, I 
came down and hustled awhile through the crowded 
little streets, and then strolled forth under a scorching 
sun, and made the outer circuit of the walls. I saw 
some tremendous uncemented blocks ; they were glar- 
ing and twinkling in the powerful light, and I had to 
put on a blue eye-glass, to throw the vague Etruscan 
past into its proper perspective. 

I spent the next day at Arezzo, in very much the 
same uninvestigating fashion. At Arezzo, you are far 
from Eome, you are well within genial Tuscany, and 
you encounter Eomance in a milder form. The ruined 



A CHAIN OF CITIES. 229 

castle on the hill, for instance (like Assisi and Cortona, 
Arezzo is furnished with this agreeable feature), has 
been converted into a blooming market-garden. But 
I lounged away the hot hours there, under a charm 
as potent as fancy could have foreshadowed it. I had 
seen Santa Maria della Pieve and its campanile of 
quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky cathedral and 
John of Pisa's elaborate marble shrine, the museum 
and its Etruscan vases and majolica platters. The 
old pacified citadel was more delicious. There were 
lovely hills all around it, cypresses casting straight 
shadows on the grassy bastions at its angles, and in 
the middle, a wondrous Italian tangle of growing wheat 
and corn, vines and figs, peaches and cabbages. 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 

LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 

BEENE, Se:ptembeT 2Uh, 1873. — In Berne again, 
some eleven weeks after having left it in July. 
I have never been in Switzerland so late, and I came 
hither innocently supposing that the last Cook's tourist 
would have paid out his last coupon and departed. 
But I was lucky, it seems, to discover an empty cot 
in an attic and a very tight place at a table d'hote. 
People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July 
they were flocking in, and the main channels of egress 
are terribly choked. I have been here several days, 
watching them come and go ; it is like the march-past 
of an army. It gives one a lively impression of the 
quantity of luxury now diffused through the world. 
Here is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of thou- 
sands of honest folks, chiefly English, and rarely, to 
judge by their faces and talk, children of light, in any 
eminent degree ; for whom snow-peaks, and glaciers, 
and passes, and lakes, and chalets, and sunsets, and a 
cafe complet, "including honey," as the coupon says, 
have become prime necessities for six weeks every 
year. It 's not so long ago that lords and nabobs 



THE ST. GOTHAED. 231 

monopolized these pleasures ; but nowadays a month's 
tour in Switzerland is no more a jeio de prince than a 
Sunday excursion. To Avatch this huge Anglo-Saxon 
wave ebbing through Berne makes one fancy that the 
common lot of mankind is after all not so very hard, 
and that the masses have reached a rather high stand- 
ard of comfort. The view of the Oberland chain, as 
you see it from the garden of the hotel, really butters 
one's bread very handsomely ; and here are I don't 
know how many hundred Cook's tourists a day, look- 
ing at it through the smoke of their pipes. Is it really 
the " masses " I see every day at the table d'hote ? 
They have rather too few h's to the dozen, as one may 
say, but their good-nature is great. Some people com- 
plain that they " vulgarize " Switzerland ; but as far 
as I am concerned, I freely give it up to them, and 
take a peculiar satisfaction in seeing them here. Swit- 
zerland is a "show country" — I think so more and 
more every time I come here ; and its use in the world 
is to reassure persons of a benevolent imagination 
when they begin to wish the mass of mankind had 
only a little more elevating amusement. Here is 
amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating, cer- 
tainly, as mountains five miles high can make it. I 
expect to live to see the summit of Monte Kosa heated 
by steam-tubes and adorned with a hotel setting three 
tables d'hote a day. 

I have been walking about the arcades, which used 
to bestow a grateful shade in July, but which seem 
rather dusky and chilly in these shortening autumn 
days. I am struck with the way the English always 



232 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

speak of them — with a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, 
as rSvil-smelling, as'' suffocating, as freezing (as it may 
be) — as anything and everything but admirably pic- 
turesque. I believe we Americans are the only people 
who, in travelling, judge things on the first impulse — 
when we do judge them at all — not from the stand- 
point of simple comfort. Most Americans, strolling 
forth into these bustling cloisters, are, I imagine, too 
much amused, too much diverted from their sense of 
an inalienable right to be comfortable, to be conscious 
of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal 
smell of strong charcuterie. If the picturesque were 
banished from the face of the earth, I think the idea 

would survive in some typical American heart I 

have perhaps spent too many days here to call Berne 
interesting, but the sturdy little town has certainly a 
powerful individuality. I ought before this to have 
made a few memoranda. 

It stands on a high promontory, with the swift, 
green i^ar girding it about and making it almost an 
island. The sides plunge down to the banks of the 
river, in some places steeply terraced (those, for in- 
stance, overlooked by the goodly houses of the grave 
old Junkerngasse) — gardens which brown, skinny old 
women are always raking and scraping and watering, 
nosing and fumbling among the cabbages like goats 
on the edge of a precipice ; in others, as beneath the 
cathedral terrace, cemented by an immense precipice 
of buttressed masonry. Within, it is homely, ugly, 
almost grotesque, but full of character. Indeed, I do 
not know why it should have so much when there are 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 233 

cities which have played twice the part in the world 
which wear a much less striking costume. The to^^n 
is almost all in length, and lies chiefly along a single 
street, stretching away, under various names, from the 
old city gate, with its deserted grassy bear-pit, where 
little chamois now are kept — tender little chamois, 
which must create an appetite, one would think, in 
the lurking ursine ghosts, if they still haunt the place 
— to the great single-arched bridge over the Aar and 
the new bear-pit, where tourists hang over the rail and 
fling turnips to the shaggy monsters. This street, like 
most of its neighbors, is built on arcades — great, 
massive, low-browed, straddling arcades — in the man- 
ner of Chester and Bologna (but far more solidly). 
The houses are gray and uneven, and mostly capped 
with great pent-house red roofs, surmounted with 
quaint little knobs and steeples and turrets. They 
have flower-pots in the windows and red cushions on 
the sills, on which, toward evening, there are generally 
planted a pair of solid Bernese elbows. If the elbows 
belong to a man, he is smoking a big-bowled pipe ; if 
they belong to one of the softer sex, the color in her 
cheeks is generally a fair match to the red in the 
cushion. The arcades are wonderful in their huge, 
awkward solidity ; there is superfluous stone and mor- 
tar enough stowed away in the piers to build a good- 
sized city on the American plan. Some of these are 
of really fabulous thickness ; I should think those in 
the Theater-Platz measured laterally, from edge to 
edge, some ten feet. The little shops in the arcades 
are very dusky and unventilated ; few of them can 



234 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

have known a good fresh air-current these twenty- 
years. There is always a sort of public extension 
of the household life on the deep green benches which 
occupy the depths of the piers. Here the women sit 
nursing their babies and patching their husbands' 
breeches. One, who is young and most exceptionally 
pretty, sits all day plying her sewing-machine, with 
her head on one side and an upward glance at ob- 
servant passers — a something that one may call the 
coquetry of industry. Another, a perfect mountain 
of a woman, is brought forth every morning, lowered, 
with the proper precautions, into her bench, and left 
there till night. She is always knitting a stockiug ; 
I have an idea that she is the fournisseuse of the whole 
little Swiss army; or she ought to wear one of those 
castellated crowns which form the coiffure of ladies 
on monuments, and sit there before all men's eyes as 
the embodied genius of the city — the patroness of 
Berne. Like the piers of the arcades, she has a most 
fantastic thickness, and her superfluous fleshly sub- 
stance could certainly furnish forth a dozen women 
on the American plan. I suppose she is forty years 
old, but her tremendous bulk is surmounted by a face 
of the most infantine freshness and naivete. She is 
evidently not a fool; on the contrary, she looks very 
sensible and amiable ; but her immense circumference 
has kept experience at bay, and she is perfectly inno- 
cent because nothing has ever happened to her. This 
wonderful woman is only a larger specimen of the 
general Bernese type — the heaviest, grossest, stolid- 
est, certainly, that I have ever seen. Every one here 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 235 

is ugly (except the little woman with the sewing- 
machine) ; every one is awkward, dogged, boorish, and 

bearish. Mr. B called my attention to the shape 

of the men ; it is precisely the shape of the bears in 
the pit when they stand up on their hind paws to beg 
for turnips — the short, thick neck, the big, sturdy 
trunk, the flat, meagre hips — the total absence of hips, 
in fact — the shrunken legs and long flat feet. Since 
making this discovery I see the bear element humanly 
and socially at every turn, and begin to regard it as a 
kind of bearish cynicism that the townsfolk should hug 
the likeness as they do, and thrust the ugly monsters 
at you, in the flesh or in effigy — carved on gate-posts 
and emblazoned on shields — wherever you glance. 

All down the middle of the long gray street are 
posted antique fountains — sculptured and emblazoned 
columns rising out of a great stone trough, and sup- 
porting some grotesque symbolic figure. These figures 
are frankly ugly, like the people and the architecture, 
but they have a rude humor which seems to have 
passed out of the local manners. If you make a joke, 
your interlocutor stares at you as if you were a placard 
in a foreign tongue. Doubtless the joke is not broad 
enough ; the joke of one of the fountains is to show 
you an ogre gobbling down a handful of little children. 
. . . . There are broad jokes made, I imagine, at the 
dbbayes or headquarters of the old guilds, of which 
some half a dozen present a wide antique facade to the 
main street, ornamented with some immense heraldic 
device, hung out like an inn sign. They serve, in a 
measure, the purpose of inns, though whether they en- 



236 TEANS ATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

tertain persons not members of their respective crafts, 
I am unable to ■ say. All crafts at any rate are repre- 
sented, — the marchands, the marechaux, the tisserands, 
the cliarpentie^^s ; there is even an dbhaye, des gentils- 
hommes, with a great genteel device of plumes and 
crossed swords. They all look as if they had a deal of 
heavy plate on their sideboards' — as if a great many 
schoppen were emptied by the smokers in the deep 
red-cushioned window-seats. The landlord of the Fau- 
con showed me a quantity of ancient silver in his 
keeping, which figures at those copious civic banquets 
at which the burghers of Berne warm themselves up, 
not infrequently, I believe, during their long winters. 
It was very handsome -and picturesque, and seemed to 
tell of a great deal of savory in-door abundance behind 
the thick walls of the gray houses. 

The cathedral, indeed, indicates an opulent city, and 
is a building of some consequence. It is fifteenth-cen- 
tury Gothic, of a rather artificial and, as Mr. Euskin 
would say, insincere kind : a long nave, without tran- 
septs ; a truncated tower, capped with a little wooden 
coiffure which decidedly increases its picturesqueness, 
especially as I see it from my window at sunrise, when 
it lifts its odd silhouette against the faintly flushing 
sky, like some fantastic cluster of spires in a drawing 
of Dore's ; a number of short flying buttresses — jump- 
ing buttresses, they might be called, as they perform 
the feat rather clumsily ; a great many crocketed 
pinnacles, and a wealth of beautiful balustrade-work 
around the roof of the nave and aisles. The great 
doorway is covered with quaint theological sculptures 



\ 



THE ST. GOTHAED. 237 

— the wise and foolish virgins, the former with a good 
deal of awkward millinery in the shape of celestial 
crowns, and the usual bas-relief of the blessed ascend- 
ing to heaven, and the damned tumbling into the pit. 
But in the middle of the portal, dividing the two doors, 
stands a tall, slim figure of a lady with a sword and 
scales, so light and elegant and graceful that she casts 
the angular sisterhood about her into ignominious 
shadow. This seraphic Justitia, and the running lace- 
work of stone I have just mentioned, around the high 
parts of the church, seem to me to contain all the ele- 
gance that is to be found in Berne. This, however, 
sounds like an unthankful speech when I remember 
that every evening, in this very cathedral, one may 
hear some very fine music. The organ is famous, like 
those of Fribourg and Lucerne, and people adjourn from 
the table d'hote to listen to it, at a franc a head. The 
church is lighted only by a few glimmering tapers, and 
as I have never been into it but at this hour, I know 
nothing of its interior aspect. I believe that, thanks 
to Swiss Protestantism, though of fine proportions, it is 
as bare and bleak as a Methodist conventicle. While 
the organ plays, however, it is filled with a presence 
which affects the imagination in very much the same 
way as gorgeous colors and vistas receding through 
mists of incense. The tremendous tones of the in- 
strument resound in the darkness with an energy and 
variety which even an unmusical man — reclining 
irreverently in the impenetrable gloom of the deep 
choir — may greatly enjoy. The organist, I believe, is 
rather unskilled, and addicted, according to his light. 



238 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

to musical clap-trap. I don't know whether his won- 
derful performances on the vox humana stops are clap- 
trap ; to my poor ear they seem the perfect romance of 
harmony. He gives you a thunder-storm complete, 
with shattering bolts and wind and rain ; then a lull 
and a sound of dripping water and sobbing trees ; and 
then, softly, a wonderful solemn choir of rejoicing voices. 
The voices are intensely real, but the charm of the 
tiling is their strangely unlocalized whereabouts. From 
a myriad miles away they seem to come ; from elysian 
spaces to which no Cook's coupon will help to convey 
us. 

The terrace beside the cathedral was the bishop's 
garden, I believe, in the Catholic days, and a stately 
many-windowed house (which must have been a good 
deal modernized a hundred and fifty years ago) was the 
bishop's palace. Now the terrace is planted with a 
dense cool shade of clipped horse-chestnut trees, with 
a capacious wooden bench under each ; and you may 
sit there of a fine day as if you were in the balcony 
of a theatre, and look off at the great spectacle — 
the view of the Oberland Alps. The foundations of 
the terrace plunge down to the bank of the Aar, a 
prodigious distance below, and the swift green river 
sends up a constant uproar as it shoots foaming over 
its dam. Across the river lie blooming slopes and 
woods and hills ; never was a city more in the fields 
than Berne. 'No shabby suburbs, no dusty walks be- 
tween walls ; the cornfields ripen at its gates ; the 
smell of the mown grass, when I was here before, came 
wandering across into the streets. It is a place of three 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 239 

elements — the straddling black arcades, the rapid green 
river, flung in a loop, as it were, around its base, tlie 
goodly green country at five minutes' walk. Of the 
Oberland chain, on the two or three days out of the 
seven when it glitters its brightest, what is one to say ? 
During the clear hot days that I spent here in July it 
was constantly visible, and yet somehow I never came 
quite to accept it as a natural ornament of the horizon. 
It seemed, in its fantastic beauty, a kind of spasmodic 
effort of Nature toward something in a higher key than 
her common performances, an attempt to please herself, 
— not man with his meagre fancy. Man is certainly 
pleased, though, as he sits at his ease forty miles off, 
and caresses with idle eyes the glittering bosom of 
the Jungfrau and the hoary forehead of the Monk. 
Hour after hour the vision lingers — a mosaic of mar- 
ble on a groundwork of lapis. Here at Berne we have 
the vision ; nearer, in the clouds, on the ice, on the 
edge of a chasm, with a rope round your waist and 
twenty pounds of nails in your shoes, you may have 
the reality. Every summer a couple of thousand Eng- 
lishmen and others find the supreme beauty in that. 
There are plenty of delightful walks hereabouts, for 
which you need neither rope nor nails. All the main 
roads leading from the town are bordered with great 
trees, rising from grassy margins and meeting overhead ; 
and sooner or later these verdurous vistas conduct you, 
in any direction, to a genuine Alpine fir forest. Beside 
the road the grain-bearing fields stretch away without 
hedge or ditch or wall In July the crops were yel- 
lowing under a great sun ; but now there is nothing 



240 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

but stubble, with enormous ravens jumping about in 
it. The way the fields lie side by side for miles, with- 
out any prosaic property- marks, makes them seem a 
part of some landscape of picture or fable ; they seem 
all to belong to the Marquis of Carabas. I have heard 
painters complain of the want of color — of certain 
colors at least — in the Swiss summer landscape; of 
the greens all being blue, the browns all being cold. 
Perhaps they are right ; autumn has fairly begun, but 
the foliage simply shrivels and rusts, and promises none 
of our October yellows and crimsons. But there is an 
indefinable, poignant charm in any autumn, under a 
long avenue of great trees, where you walk kicking the 
fallen leaves and looking at an old peasant- woman in 
the hazy distance, as she trudges under her fagot. 

Lucerne, September 29th. — Berne, I find, has been 
filling with tourists at the expense of Lucerne, which 
I have been having almost to myself. There are six 
people at the table d'hote ; the excellent dinner de- 
notes, on the part of the chef, the easy leisure in which 
true artists love to work. The waiters have nothing to 
do but lounge about the hall and chink in their pockets 
the fees of the past season. The day has been most 
lovely in itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gen- 
tle glow of a natural satisfaction at finding myself on 
the threshold of Italy again. I am lodged en prince, in 
a room with a balcony hanging over the lake — a bal- 
cony on which I spent a long time this morning at 
dawn, thanking the mountain-tops, from the depths of 
a tourist's heart, for their promise of superbly fair 
weather. There were a great many mountain-tops to 



THE ST. GOTHAED. 241 

thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled 
away through the morning mist, in an endless confu- 
sion of grandeur. I have been all day in better humor 
with Lucerne than ever before — a forecast reflection 
of Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other 
day, is a show-place. Lucerne is certainly one of the 
biggest booths at the fair. The little quay, under the 
trees, squeezed in between the decks of the steamboats 
and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley of Saxon 
dialects — a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of de- 
votion, equipped with book and staff — alpenstock and 
Baedeker. There are so many hotels and trinket-shops, 
so many omnibuses and steamers, so many St. Gothard 
veturini, so many ragged urchins thrusting photographs, 
minerals, and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as 
if lake and mountains themselves, in all their loveli- 
ness, were but a part of the " enterprise " of landlords 
and pedlers, and half expect to see the Kighi, and Pi- 
latus, and the fine weather figure as items on your 
hotel-bill, between the hoiigie and the siphon. Nature 
herself assists you in this fancy ; for there is something 
extremely operatic and suggestive of foot-lights and 
scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. 
You are one of five thousand — fifty thousand — " ac- 
commodated " spectators ; you have taken your season- 
ticket, and there is a responsible impresario somewhere 
behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty 
in the prospect — such a redundancy of composition 
and effect — so many more peaks and pinnacles than 
are needed to make one heart happy or regale the vis- 
ion of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the 
11 p . 



242 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

little Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the 
clouds as equal parts of a perfect system, and feel as if 
the mountains had been waiting so many ages for the 
hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that they 
have a rioht, after all, to have them hm and numerous. 
The scene-shifters have been at work all day long, com- 
posing and discomposing the beautiful background of 
the prospect — massing the clouds and scattering the 
light, effacing and reviving, making play with their 
wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains 
rise one behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of 
distances and of melting blues and grays ; you think 
each successive tone the loveliest and haziest possi- 
ble, till you see another looming dimly behind it. I 
could n't enjoy even the Swiss Times, over my break- 
fast, until I had marched forth to the office of the St. 
Gothard diligences and demanded the banquette for to- 
morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office 
was taken, but I might possibly m entendre with the 
conductor for his own seat — the conductor being gen- 
erally visible, in the intervals of business, at the post- 
office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I repaired, 
over the fine new bridge which now spans the green 
Eeuss, and gives such a woful air of country-cousin- 
ship to the crooked old wooden causeway which did sole 
service when I was here four years ago. The old bridge 
is covered with a runnino- hood of shinoies, and adorned 
with a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings 
of the Dance of Death, quite in the Holbein manner ; 
the new bridge sends up a painful glare from its white 
limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a mer- 



THE ST. GOTHAED. 243 

etricious imitation of platinum. As a pure-minded 
tourist, I ought to have chosen to return at least by the 
dark and narrow way ; but mark how luxury unmans 
us ! I was already demoralized. I crossed the thresh- 
old of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and re- 
treated. It smelt ladly I So I marched back, counting 
the lamps in their mendacious platinum. But it smelt 
very badly indeed ; and no good American is without 
a fund of accumulated sensibility to the odor of stale 
timber. 

Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of 
the post-office, waiting for my conductor to turn up, 
and watching the yellow malles-postes being pushed to 
and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, 
I was brought to speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, de- 
lightful Italian, clad in the blue coat and waistcoat, 
with close, round silver buttons, which are a heritage 
of the old postilions. N'o, it was not he ; it was a 
friend of his ; and finally the friend was produced, en 
costume cle mile, but equally jovial, and Italian enough 
— a brave Lucernese, who had spent half of his life 
between Bellinzona and Camerlata. Tor ten francs 
this worthy man's perch behind the luggage was made 
mine as far as Bellinzona, and we separated with recip- 
rocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. To- 
morrow is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any 
other 30th of September since the weather became, on 
this planet, a topic of conversation, that I have had 
nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, staring, loafing, 
and vaguely intent upon regarding the fact that, what- 
ever happens, my place is paid to Milan, as the most 



244 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

comfortable fact in this uncertain world. I loafed into 
the immense new Hotel National, and read the New 
York Tribune on a blue satin divan, and was rather 
surprised, on coming out, to find myself staring at a 
green Swiss lake, and not at the Broadway omnibuses. 
The Hotel National is adorned with a perfectly ap- 
pointed Broadway bar — one of the " prohibited " ones, 
seeking hospitality in foreign lands, like an old-fash- 
ioned French or Italian refugee. 

Milan, October 4,th. — My journey hither was- such a 
pleasant piece of traveller's luck that it seems almost 
indelicate to take it to pieces to see what it was made 
of. But do what we will, there remains in all deeply 
agreeable impressions a charming something we cannot 
analyze. I found it agreeable even, under the circum- 
stances, to turn out of bed, at Lucerne, at four o'clock, 
into the chilly autumn darkness. The thick-starred 
Sfky was cloudless, and there w^as as yet no flush of dawn ; 
but the lake was wrapped in a ghostly white mist, 
which crept half-way up the mountains, and made 
them look as if they too had been lying down for the 
night, and were casting away the vaporous tissues of 
their bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little 
steamer went creaking away, and I hung about the 
deck with the two or three travellers who had known 
better than to believe it would save them francs or 
midnight sighs — over those debts you '' pay with your 
person " — to go and wait for the diligence at the Poste 
at Fliielen, or yet at the GuiUaume Tell. The dawn 
came sailing up over the mountain-tops, flushed but 
unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and then the 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 245 

big ones, as a thrifty matron, after a party, blows out 
her candles and lamps ; the mist went melting and 
wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses 
of the mountains, and the summits defined their pro- 
files against the cool, soft light. 

At Fliielen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches 
were actively making themselves bigger, and piling up 
boxes and bags on their roofs in a way to make ner- 
vous people think of the short turns on the downward 
zigzags of the St. Gothard. I climbed into my own 
banquette, and stood eating peaches (half a dozen wo- 
men were hawking them about under the horses' legs) 
with an air of security which might have been offensive 
to the people scrambling and protesting below between 
coupe and interieur. They were all English, and they 
all had false alarms about some one else being in their 
places — the places which they produced their tickets 
and proclaimed in three or four different languages that 
British gold had given them a sacred right to. They 
were all serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced, 
many-buttoned conductors, patted on the backs, assured 
that their bath-tubs had every advantage of position 
on the top, and stowed away according to their dues. 
When once one has fairly started on a journey and has 
but to go and go, by the impetus received, it is surpris- 
ing w^hat entertainment one finds in very small things. 
The traveller's humor falls upon us, and surely it is not 
the unwisest the heart knows. I do not envy people, at 
any rate, who have outlived or outworn the simple en- 
tertainment of feeling settled to go somewhere, with bag 
and umbrella. If we are settled on the top of a coach, 



246 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

and the " somewhere " contains an element of the new 
and strange, the case is at its best. In this matter wise 
people are content to become children again. We don't 
turn about on our knees to look out of the omnibus- 
window, but we indulge in very much the same round- 
eyed contemplation of accessible objects. Eesponsi- 
bility is left at home, or, at the worst, packed away in 
the valise, in quite another part of the diligence, with 
the clean shirts and the writing-case. I imbibed the 
traveller's humor, for this occasion, with the somewhat 
acrid juice of my indifferent peaches ; it made me 
think them very good. This was the first of a series 
of kindly services it rendered me. It made me agree 
next, as we started, that the gentleman at the booking- 
office at Lucerne had played but a harmless joke when 
he told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. 
No one appeared to claim it ; so the conductor and I 
reversed positions, and I found him quite as profitable 
a neighbor as the usual Anglo-Saxon. He was trolling 
snatches of melody, and showing his great yellow teeth 
in a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona — and this 
in the face of the sombre fact that the St. Gothard tun- 
nel is scraping away into the mountain, all the while, 
under his nose, and numbering the days of the many- 
buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service' 
sake, to be taken into the employ of the railway ; he 
has no sesthetic prejudices. I found the railway com- 
ing on, however, in a manner very shocking to mine. 
About one hour short of Andermatt they have pierced 
a huge black cavity in the mountain, and around this 
d^sky aperture there has grown up a swarming, dig- 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 247 

ging, hammering, smoke-compelling colony. There are 
great barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the roman- 
tic gorge, and a wonderful increase of wine-shops in 
the little village of Goschenen above. Along the breast 
of the mountain, beside the road, come wandering sev- 
eral miles of very handsome iron pipes, of a stupendous 
girth — a conduit for the water-power with which 
some of the machinery is worked. It lies at its mighty 
length among the rocks like an immense black serpent, 
and serves, as a mere detail, to give one the measure of 
the central enterprise. When at the end of our long 
day's journey, well down in warm Italy, we came upon 
the other aperture of the tunnel, I felt really like un- 
capping, with a kind of reverence. Truly, JSTature is 
great, but she seems to me to stand in very much the 
same shoes as my poor friend the conductor. She is 
being superseded at her strongest points, successively, 
and nothing remains but for her to take humble service 
with her master. If she can hear herself think, amid 
that din of blasting and hammering, she must be reck- 
oning up the years which may elapse before the clev- 
erest of Ober-Ingenieurs decides that mountains are 
altogether superfluous, and has the Jungfrau melted 
down and the residuum carried away in balloons and 
dumped upon another planet. 

The Devil's Bridge, apparently, has the same failing 
as the good Homer. It was decidedly nodding. The 
volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, and 
there was none of that thunderous uproar and far- 
leaping spray which have kept up a miniature tempest 
in the neighborhood when I have passed before. It 



248 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

suddenly occurs to me that the fault is not in the good 
Homer's inspiration, but simply in the big black pipes 
I just mentioned. They dip into the rushing stream 
higher up, apparently, and pervert its fine frenzy to 
their prosaic uses. There could hardly be a more vivid 
reminder of the standing quarrel between use and 
beauty, and the hard time poor beauty is having. I 
looked wistfully, as we rattled into dreary Andermatt, 
at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road climbing 
away to the left. Even on one's way to Italy one may 
spare a pulsation of desire for that beautiful journey 
through the castled Orisons. I shall always remember 
my day's drive last summer through that long blue 
avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering Ilanz, 
visited before supper in the ghostly dusk, as an episode 
with color in it. At Andermatt a sign over a little 
black doorway, flanked by two dunghills, seemed to 
me tolerably comical : Mineraux, Quadrupedes, Oiseaux, 
CEufs, Tableaux Antiques. We bundled in to dinner, and 
the American gentleman in the banquette made the 
acquaintance of the Irish lady in the coupe, who talked 
of the weather as foine, and wore a Persian scarf 
twisted about her head. At the other end of the table 
sat an Englishman out of the interieur, who bore a 
most extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of 
Edward YI.'s and Mary's reigns. He was a walking 
Holbein. It was fascinating, and he must have won- 
dered why I stared at him. It was not him I was 
staring at, but some handsome Seymour, or Dudley, or 
Digby, with a ruff and a round cap and plume. From 
Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, into 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 249 

rugged little Hospentlial, and then up the last stages 
of the ascent. From here the road was all new to me. 
Among the summits of the various Alpine passes there 
is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into 
keener cold and deeper stillness ; you put on your 
overcoat and turn up the collar ; you count the nestling 
snow-patches, and then you cease to count them ; you 
pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and 
listen to the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below 
you, in kindlier herbage. The sky was tremendously 
blue, and the little stunted bushes, on the snow- 
streaked slopes, were all dyed with, autumnal purples 
and crimsons. It was a great piece of color. Purple 
and crimson, too, though not so fine, were the faces 
thrust out at us from the greasy little double casements 
of a barrack beside the road, where the horses paused 
before the last pull. There was one little girl in par- 
ticular, beginning to lisser her hair, as civilization ap- 
proached, in a manner not to be described, with her 
poor little blue-black hands. At the summit there are 
the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue 
tarn, the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sun- 
shine. Then we began to rattle down, with two horses. 
In five minutes we were swinging along the famous 
zigzags. Engineer, driver, horses — it's very hand- 
somely done by all of them. The road curves and 
curls, and twists and plunges, like the tail of a kite ; 
sitting perched in the banquette, you see it making be- 
low you, in mid-air, certain bold gyrations, which bring 
you as near as possible, short of the actual experience, 
to the philosophy of that immortal Irishman who 
11* 



250 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

wished that his fall from the house-top would only last. 
But the zigzags last no more than Paddy's fall, and in 
due time we were all coming to our senses over cafe au 
lait in the little inn at Faido. After Faido, the valley, 
plunging deeper, began to take thick afternoon shadows 
from the hills, and at Airolo we were fairly in the twi- 
light. But the pink and yellow houses shimmered 
through the gentle gloom, and Italy began in broken 
syllables to whisper that she was at hand. For the 
rest of the way to Bellinzona her voice was muffled in 
the gray of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the 
charming sight of the changing vegetation. But only 
half vexed, for the moon was climbing all the while 
nearer the edge of the crags which overshadowed us, 
and a thin, magical light came trickling down into the 
winding, murmuring gorges. It was a most enchanting 
ride. The chestnut-trees loomed up with double their 
daylight stature ; the vines began to swing their low 
festoons like nets to trip up the fairies. At last the 
ruined towers of Bellinzona stood gleaming in the 
moonshine, and we rattled into the great post-yard. It 
was eleven o'clock, and I had risen at four ; moonshine 
apart, I was not sorry. 

All that was very well ; but the drive next day from 
Bellinzona to Como is to my mind what gives its 
supreme beauty to the St. Gothard road. One cannot 
describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one 
try, if one could ; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it 
only as a picture on a fireboard recalls a Claude. But 
it lay spread before me for a whole perfect day — in 
the long gleam of Lago Maggiore, from whose head the 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 251 

diligence swerves away, and begins to climb the bosky 
hills which divide it from Lugano ; in the shimmering, 
melting azure of the Italian Alps ; in the luxurious 
tangle of nature and the familiar picturesqueness of 
man ; in the lawn-like slopes, where the great grouped 
chestnuts make so cool a shadow in so warm a light ; 
in the rusty vineyards, the littered cornfields, and the 
tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all, it is the deep 
yellow light which enchants you and tells you where 
you are. See it come filtering down through a vine- 
covered trellis on the red handkerchief with which a 
ragged contadina has bound her hair ; and all the magic 
of Italy, to the eye, seems to make an aureole about the 
poor girl's head. Look at a brown-breasted reaper eat- 
ing his chunk of black bread under a spreading chest- 
nut ; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is color 
so charged, nowhere is accident so picturesque. The 
whole drive to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the 
town itself is admirably Italian. There was a great 
unlading of the coach, during which I wandered under 
certain brown old arcades, and bought for six sous, from 
a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches 
and figs. When I came back, I found the young man 
holding open the door of the second diligence, which 
had lately come up, and beckoning to me with a despair- 
ing smile. The young man, I must note, was the most 
amiable of Ticinese ; though he wore no buttons, he was 
attached to the diligence in some amateurish capacity, 
and had an eye to the mail -bags and otlier valuables in 
the boot. I grumbled, at Berne, over the want of soft 
curves in the Swiss temperament ; but the children of 



252 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

the tangled Tessin are cast in the Italian mould. My 
friend had as many quips and cranks as a Neapolitan ; 
we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, 
while the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and 
he never stopped singing till we reached a little wine- 
house, where he got his mouth full of bread and cheese. 
.... I looked into the open door and saw the young 
woman sitting rigid and grim, staring over his head, 
with a great pile of bread and butter in her lap. He 
had only informed her, most politely, that she was to 
be transferred to another diligence, and must do him 
the favor to descend ; but she evidently thought there 
was but one way for a respectable British young wo- 
man, dropping her h's, to receive the politeness of a 
foreign young man with a moustache and much latent 
pleasantry in his eye. Heaven only knew what he was 
saying ! I told her, and she gathered up her parcels 
and emerged. A part of the day's great pleasure, per- 
haps, was my grave sense of being an instrument in the 
hands of Providence toward the safe consignment of 
this young woman and her boxes. When once you 
have taken a baby into your arms, you are in for it ; 
you can't drop it — you have to hold it till some one 
comes. My rigid Abigail was a neophyte in foreign 
travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, 
which I inferred to be that of making up those pro- 
digious chignons which English ladies wear. Her mis- 
tress had gone on a mule over the mountains to Caden- 
nabbia, and she was coming up with her wardrobe, in 
two big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, 
under Providence, at Bellinzona, and had interposed 



THE ST. GOTHARD. 253 

between the poor girl's frightened English and the 
dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries in the 
post-yard. At the custom-house, on the Italian frontier, 
I was of peculiar service ; there was a kind of fateful 
fascination in it. The wardrobe was voluminous ; I 
exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as the 
douanier plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the 
lady at Cadennabbia ? What was she to me or I to 
her ? She would n't know, when she rustled down to 
dinner next day, that it was / who had guided the frail 
skiff of her decorative fortunes to port. So, unseen, 
but not unfelt, do we cross each other's orbits. The 
skiff, however, may have foundered that evening, in 
sight of land. I disengaged the young woman from 
among her fellow-travellers, and placed her boxes on a 
hand-cart, in the picturesque streets of Como, within a 
stone's throw of that lovely cathedral, with its facade 
of cameo medallions. I could only make the facchino 
swear to take her to the steamboat. He too was a 
jovial dog, and I hope he was polite — but not too 
polite. 



SIENA. 

Siena, October, 1873. 

FLOEENCE being oppressively hot and delivered 
over to the mosquitoes, the occasion seemed excel- 
lent to pay that visit to Siena which I had more than 
once planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening, 
by the light of a magnificent moon ; and while a couple 
of benignantly mumbling old crones were making up 
my bed at the inn, I strolled forth in quest of a first im- 
pression. Five minutes brought me to where I might 
gather it unhindered, as it bloomed in the white moon- 
shine. The great Piazza in Siena is famous, and though 
in this day of photographs none of the world's wonders 
can pretend, like Wordsworth's phantom of delight, 
really "to startle and waylay," yet as I suddenly 
stepped into this Piazza from under a dark archway, it 
seemed a vivid enough revelation of the picturesque. 
It is in the shape of a shallow horseshoe, the untravelled 
reader who has turned over his travelled friend's port- 
folio will remember ; or, better, of a bow, in which the 
high facade of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the chord 
and everything else the arc. It was void of any hu- 
man presence which could recall me to the current year, 
and, the moonshine assisting, I had half an hour's 
fantastic vision of mediaeval Italy. The Piazza being 



SIENA. 255 

built on the side of a hill — or rather, as I believe 
science affirms, in the cup of a volcanic crater — the 
vast pavement converges downward in slanting radia- 
tions of stonC; like the spokes of a great wheel, to a 
point directly in front of the Palazzo, which may figure 
the hub, though it is nothing more ornamental than 
the mouth of a drain. The Palazzo stands on the lower 
side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and 
its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-coun- 
tenanced by the huge private dwellings which occupy 
the opposite eminence. This might be — if it were not 
that the Palazzo asserts itself with an architectural 
gesture, as one may say, of extraordinary dignity. 

On the firm edge of the edifice, from bracketed base 
to gray-capped summit against the sky, there grows a 
slender tower, which soars and soars till it has given 
notice of the city's greatness over the blue mountains 
which define the horizon. It rises straight and slim as 
a pennoned lance, planted on the steel-shod toe of a 
mounted knight, and retains unperturbed in the blue 
air, far above the changing fasliions of the market- 
place, an indefinable expression of mediaeval rectitude 
and chivalric honor. This beautiful tower is the finest 
thing in Siena, and, in its rigid fashion, one of the 
finest in the world. As it stood silvered by the moon- 
light during my traveller's revery, it seemed to say 
with peculiar distinctness that it survived from an order 
of things which tlie march of history had trampled out, 
but which had had an epoch of intense vitality. The 
gigantic houses enclosing the rest of the Piazza took up 
the tale, and seemed to murmur, " We are very old and 



256 TKANS ATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

a trifle weary, but we v/ere built strong and piled bigh, 
and we sball last for many a year. The present is cold 
and heedless, but we keep ourselves in heart by brood- 
ing over our treasure of memories and traditions. We 
are haunted houses, in every creaking timber and crum- 
bling stone." In the moonshine, one may fancy a 
group of Sienese palazzi dropping a few dusky hints, 
in this manner, to a well-disposed American traveller. 

Since that night I have been having a week's day- 
light knowledge of this ancient city, and I don't know 
that I can present it as anything more than a deeper 
impression than ever that Italy is the land for the 
artist. Siena has kept, to the eye, her historic physi- 
ognomy most unchanged. Other places, perhaps, may 
treat you to as drowsy a perfume of antiquity, but few' 
of them exhale it from so large a surface. Lying 
massed within her walls upon a dozen clustered hill- 
tops, Siena still looks like a place which once lived in 
a large way ; and if much of her old life is extinct, her 
smouldering ashes form a very goodly pile. This gen- 
eral impression of the past, is the main thing that she 
has to offer the casual observer. The casual observer 
is generally not very learned nor much of an his- 
torical specialist ; his impression is necessarily vague, 
and many of the chords of his imagination respond 
with a rather muffled sound. But such as it is, his 
impression keeps him faithful company and reminds 
him from time to time that even the lore of German 
doctors is but the shadow of satisfied curiosity. I 
have been living at the inn and walking about the 
streets ; these are the simple terms of my experience. 



SIENA. 257 

But inns and streets in Italy are the vehicles of half 
one's knowledge ; if one has no fancy for their les- 
sons, one may burn one's note-book. In Siena every- 
thing is Sienese. The inn has an English sign over 
the door — a little battered plate with a rusty repre- 
sentation of the lion and the unicorn ; but advance 
hopefully into the mouldy stone alley which serves as 
vestibule, and you will find local color enough. The 
landlord, I was told, had been servant in an English 
family, and I was curious to see how he met the frown 
of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the latter's first twelve 
hours in his establishment. As he failed to appear, I 
asked the waiter if he was not at home. " 0," said 
the latter, " he 's a piccolo veccliiotto grasso who does n't 
like to move." I 'm afraid this little fat old man has 
simply a bad conscience. It 's no small burden for 
one who likes the Italians — as who does n't, under 
this restriction ? — to have this matter of the neglected, 
the proscribed scrubbing-brush to dispose of. What 
is the real philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul sur- 
faces merely superficial ? If unclean manners have in 
truth the moral meaniug which I suspect in them, we 
must love Italy better than consistency. This a num- 
ber of us are prepared to do, but while we are making 
the sacrifice it is as well we should know it. 

We may plead, moreover, for these impecunious 
heirs of the past, that even if it were easy to be clean 
in the midst of their moulderinf]^ heritage, it would be 
difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming a shame- 
fully sordid Yankee, I feel tempted to say that the 
prime result of my contemplative strolls in the dusky 



258 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

alleys of Siena is an ineffable sense of disrepair. 
Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, crumbling, 
rotting. N'o young Sienese eyes rest upon anything 
youthful ; they open into a world battered and befouled 
with long use. Everything has passed its meridian 
except the brilliant facade of the cathedral, which is 
being diligently retouched and restored, and a few 
private palaces whose broad fronts seem to have been 
lately furbished and polished. Siena was long ago 
mellowed to the pictorial tone ; the operation of time, 
now, is to deposit shabbiness upon shabbiness. But it 
is for the most part a patient, sturdy, sympathetic 
shabbiness, which soothes rather than irritates the 
nerves, and has in most cases, doubtless, as long a 
career to run as most of our brittle new- world fresh- 
ness. It projects at all events a deeper shadow into 
the constant twilight of the narrow streets — that 
vague, historic dusk, as I may call it, in which one 
walks and wonders. These streets are hardly more 
than sinuous flagged alleys, into w^hich the huge black 
houses, between their almost meeting cornices, suffer a 
meagre light to filter down over rough-hewn stone, past 
windows often of graceful Gothic form, and great pen- 
dent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scat- 
tered over their many-headed hill, they are often quite 
grotesquely steep, and so impracticable for carriages 
that the sound of wheels is only a trifle less anomalous 
than it would be in Venice. But all day long there 
comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet 
and clangor of voices. The weather is very warm for 
the season, all the world is out of doors, and the Tus- 



SIENA. 259 

can tongue (which in Siena is reputed to have a classic 
purity) is wagging in every imaginable key. It does 
not rest even at night, and I am often an uninvited 
guest at concerts and conversazioni at two o'clock in 
the morning. The concerts are sometimes charming. 
I not only do not curse my wakefulness, but I go to 
my window to listen. Three men come carolling by, 
trolling and quavering with voices of delightful sweet- 
ness, or a lonely troubadour in his shirt-sleeves draws 
such artful love-notes from his clear, fresh tenor, that I 
seem for the moment to be behind the scenes at the 
opera, watching some Eubini or Mario go " on," and 
waiting for the round of applause. In the intervals, a 
couple of friends or enemies stop — Italians always 
make their points in conversation by stopping, letting 
you walk on a few paces, to turn and find them stan(i- 
ing with finger on nose, and engaging your interrogative 
eye — they pause, by a happy instinct, directly under 
my window, and dispute their point or tell their story 
or make their confidence. I can hardly tell which it 
is, everything has such an explosive promptness, such a 
redundancy of inflection and action. Whatever it is, 
it 's a story, compared with our meagre Anglo-Saxon 
colloquies, or rather it 's a drama, improvised, mim- 
icked, shaped and rounded, carried bravely to its de- 
nouement. The speaker seems actually to establish his 
stage and face his foot-lights, to create by a gesture a 
little scenic circumscription about him ; he rushes to 
and fro and shouts and stamps and postures and ranges 
through every phase of his inspiration. I observed the 
other evening a striking instance of the spontaneity of 



260 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

Italian gesture, in the person of a little Sienese of I 
hardly know what exact age — the age of inarticulate 
sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a 
Sunday evening, and this little man had accompanied 
his parents to the cafe. The Gaffe Greco at Siena is a 
most delightful institution ; you get a capital demi-tasse 
for three sous, and an excellent ice for eight, and while 
you consume these easy luxuries you may buy from a 
little hunchback the local weekly periodical, the Vita 
Nuova, for three centimes (the two centimes left from 
your sou, if you are under the spell of this magical 
frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend 
w^as sitting on his father's' knee, and helping himself 
to the half of a strawberry-ice with which his mamma 
had presented him. He had so many misadventures 
with his spoon that this lady at length confiscated it, 
there being nothing left of his ice but a little crimson 
liquid which he might dispose of as other little boys 
had done before him. But he was no friend, it ap- 
peared, to such irregular methods; he was a perfect 
little gentleman, and he resented the imputation of 
indelicacy. He protested, therefore, and it was the 
manner of his protest that struck me. He did not cry 
audibly, though he made a very wry face. It was no 
stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It 
was a penetrating concord of inarticulably pleading, 
accusing sounds, accompanied with the most exquis- 
itely modulated gestures. The gestures were perfectly 
mature ; he did everything that a man of forty would 
have done if he had been pouring out a flood of sono- 
rous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders and wrin- 



SIENA. 261 

kled his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his 
arms, obtruded his chin and bobbed about his head — - 
and at hist, I am happy to say, recovered his spoon. 
If I had had a solid little silver one I would have pre- 
sented it to him as a testinronial to a perfect, though as 
yet unconscious, artist. 

My artistic infant, however, has diverted me from, 
what I had in mind — a much weightier matter — the 
great private palaces which are so powerful a feature in 
the physiognomy of the city. They are extraordinarily 
spacious and numerous, and one wonders what part 
they can play in the meagre economy of the Siena of 
to-day. The Siena of to-day is a mere shrunken sem- 
blance of the vigorous little republic which in the 
thirteenth century waged triumphant war with Flor- 
ence, cultivated the arts with splendor, planned a 
cathedral (though it had ultimately to curtail the de- 
sign) of proportions almost unequalled, and contained a 
population of two hundred thousand souls. Many of 
these dusky piles still bear the names of the old medi- 
aeval magnates, whose descendants occupy them in a 
much more irresponsible fashion. Half a dozen of 
them are as high as the Strozzi and Eiccardi palaces in 
Florence ; they could n't w^ell be higher. There is to 
an American something richly artificial and scenic, as 
it were, in the way these colossal dwellings are packed 
together in their steep streets, in the depths of their 
little enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our 
day and country, raise a structure of half the mass and 
stateliness, we leave a great space about it in the man- 
ner of a pause after an effective piece of talking. But 



262 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

when a Sienese countess, as things are here, is doing 
her hair near the window, she is a wonderfully near 
neighbor to the cavalier opposite, who is being shaved 
by his valet. Possibly the countess does not object to 
a certain chosen publicity at her toilet : an Italian gen- 
tleman tells me the aristocracy are very " corrupt." 
Some of the palaces are shown, but only when the 
occupants are at home, and now they are in villeggia- 
tura. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months of the 
year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend 
little more than the carnival in the city. The gossip 
of an inn-waiter ought, perhaps, to be beneath the 
dignity of even such meagre history as this ; but I con- 
fess that when I have come in from my strolls with a 
kind of irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and 
mortar, I have listened with a certain avidity, over my 
dinner, to the proffered confidences of the worthy man 
who stands by with a napkin. His talk is really very 
fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated 
tone. He called my attention to it. He has very lit- 
tle good to say about the Sienese nobility. They are 
" proprio d'origine egoista " — whatever that may be — 
and there are many who can't write their names. This 
may be calumny ; but I doubt whether the biggest coro- 
net of them all could have spoken more delicately of 
a lady of peculiar personal appearance, who had been 
dining near me. " She 's too fat," I said grossly, wlien 
she had left the room. The waiter shook his head, 
with a little sniff : " E troppo materiale." This lady 
and her companion were the party whom, thinking I 
would relish a little company (I had been dining alone 



SIENA. 263 

for a week), he gleefully annoTinced to me as newly 
arrived Americans. They were Americans, I found, 
who wore black lace veils pinned on their heads, con- 
veyed their beans to their mouths with a knife, and 
spoke a strange, raucous Spanish. They were from 
Montevideo. The genius of old Siena, however, would 
be certainly rather amused at the stress I lay on the 
distinction ; for one American is about as much in 
order as another, as he stands before the great loggia 
of the Casino dei N"obili. The nobility, which is very 
numerous and very rich, is still, said the Italian gentle- 
man whom I just now quoted, perfectly feudal. Mor- 
ally, intellectually, behind the walls of its palaces, 
you '11 find the fourteenth century. There is no bour- 
geoisie to speak of; immediately after the aristocracy 
come the poor people, who are very poor indeed. My 
friend's account of this domiciliary mediaevalism made 
me wish more than ever, as an amateur of the pictu- 
resque, that your really appreciative tourist was not 
reduced to simply staring at black stones and peeping up 
stately staircases ; but that when he has examined the 
facade of the palace, Murray in hand, he might march 
up to the great drawing-room, make his bow to the mas- 
ter and mistress, the old abbe and the young count, and 
invite them to favor him with a little sketch of their 
social philosophy, or a few first-rate family anecdotes. 

The dusky labyrinth of the streets of Siena is in- 
terrupted by two great sunny spaces : the fan-shaped 
Piazza, of which I just now said a word, and the little 
square in which the cathedral erects its shining walls 
of marble. Of course since paying the great Piazza 



264 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

my compliments by moonlight, I have strolled through 
it often both at sunnier and shadier hours. The mar- 
ket is held there, and where Italians are buying and 
selling you may count upon lively entertainment. It 
has been held there, I suppose, for the last five hun- 
dred years, and during that time the cost of eggs and 
earthen pots has been gradually but inexorably increas- 
ing. The buyers, nevertheless, wrestle over their pur- 
chases as lustily as if they were fourteenth-century 
burghers suddenly waking up in horror to current 
prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the 
Palazzo Pubblico, to feel yourself very much like a 
thrifty old medisevalist. The state affairs of the re- 
public were formerly transacted here, but it now gives 
shelter to modern law-courts and other prosy business. 
I was marched through a number of vaulted halls and 
chambers, which, in the intervals of the administrative 
sessions held in them, are peopled only with the pres- 
ence of the great, mouldering, archaic frescos on the 
walls and ceilings. The chief painters of the Sienese 
school lent a hand in decorating them, and you may 
complete here the connoisseurship in which, possibly, 
you embarked at the Academy. I say " possibly," in 
order to be very judicial, for my own observation has 
led me no great length. I have been taking an idle 
satisfaction in the thought that the Sienese school has 
suffered my enthusiasm peacefully to slumber, and 
benignantly abstained from adding to my intellectual 
responsibilities. " A formidable rival to the Floren- 
tine," says some book — I forget which — into which I 
recently glanced. ^N'ot a bit of it, say I ; the Moren- 



SIENA. 265 

tines may rest on their laurels, all along the line. The 
early painters of the two groups have indeed much in 
common ; but the Florentines had the good fortune of 
seeing their efforts gathered up and applied by a few 
pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue 
of the groping Sienese. Era Angelico and Ghirlandaio 
said all their feebler confreres dreamt of, and a great 
deal more beside, but the inspiration of Simone Memmi 
and Ambroo'io Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has a 
painful air of never efflorescing into a maximum. So- 
doma and Beccafumi are to my taste a rather abortive 
maximum. But one should speak of them all gently 
— and I do, from my soul; for their earnest labors 
have wrought a truly picturesque heritage of color and 
rich, figure-peopled shadow for the echoing chambers 
of their old civic fortress. The faded frescos cover 
the walls like quaintly storied tapestries ; in one way 
or another, they please. If one owes a large debt of 
pleasure to painting, one gets to think of the whole 
history of art tenderly, as the conscious experience of 
a single mysterious spirit, and one shrinks from saying 
rude things about any particular phase of it, just as 
one w^ould from touching brusquely upon an erratic 
episode in the life of a person one esteemed. You 
don't care to remind a grizzled veteran of his defeats, 
and why should we linger in Siena to talk about Bec- 
cafumi ? I by no means go so far as to say, with an 
amateur with whom I have just been discussing the 
matter, that " Sodoma is a precious poor painter, and 
Beccafumi no painter at all " ; but opportunity being 
limited, I am willing to let the remark about Becca- 

12 



266 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

fumi pass for true. With regard to Sodoma, I remem- 
ber seeing four years ago in the choir of the Cathedral 
of Pisa a certain little dusky specimen of the painter 
— an Abraham and Isaac, if I 'm not mistaken — 
which was full of a kind of gloomy grace. One rarely 
meets him in general collections, and I had never done 
so till the other day. He was not prolific, apparently ; 
he had elegance, and his rarity is a part of it. 

Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered fres- 
cos, and three or four canvases ; his masterpiece, among 
others, a very impressive Descent from the Cross. I 
would not give a fig for the equilibrium of the fig- 
ures or the ladders ; but while it lasts the scene is all 
intensely solemn and graceful and sweet — too sweet 
for so bitter a subject. Sodoma's women are strangely 
sweet ; an imaginative sense of morbid, appealing atti- 
tude seems to me the author's finest accomplishment. 
His frescos have all the same vague softness, and a 
kind of mild melancholy, which I am inclined to think 
the sincerest part of them, for it strikes me as being 
simply the artist's depressed suspicion of his own want 
of force. Once he determined, however, that if he 
could not be strong, he would make capital of his 
weakness, and painted the Christ bound to the Column, 
of the Academy. It is resolutely pathetic, and I have 
no doubt the painter mixed his colors with his tears ; 
but I cannot describe it better than by saying that it 
is, pictorially, the first of the modern Christs. Unfor- 
tunatel}^, it is not the last. 

The main strength of Sienese art went, possibly, into 
the erection of the cathedral, and yet even here the 



SIENA. 267 

strength is not of the greatest strain. If, however, 
there are more interesting churches in Italy, there are 
few more richly and variously picturesque ; the com- 
parative meagreness of the architectural idea is overlaid 
by a marvellous wealth of ingenious detail. Opposite 
the church — with the dull old archbishop's palace on 
one side and a dismantled residence of the late Grand 
Duke of Tuscany on the other — is an ancient hospital 
with a big stone bench running all along its front. 
Here I have sat awhile every morning for a week, like 
a philosophic convalescent, watching the florid faQade 
of the cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It 
has been lavishly restored of late years, and the fresh 
white marble of the densely clustered pinnacles and 
statues and beasts and flowers seems to flash in the 
sunshine like a mosaic of jewels. There is more of this 
goldsmith's work in stone than I can remember or de- 
scribe ; it is piled up over three great doors with im- 
mense margins of exquisite decorative sculpture — still 
in the ancient cream-colored marble — and beneath 
three sharp pediments embossed with images relieved 
against red marble and tipped with golden mosaics. It 
is in the highest degree fantastic and luxuriant, and, 
on the whole, very lovely. As an affair of color it pre- 
pares yon for the interior, which is supremely rich in 
mellow tones and clustering shadows. The greater 
part of its surface is wrought in alternate courses of 
black and white marble ; but as the latter has been 
dimmed by the centuries to a fine mild brown, the 
place seems all a rich harmony of grave colors. Except 
certain charming frescos by Pinturicchio in the sacristy. 



268 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

there are no pictures to speak of; but the pavement 
is covered with many elaborate designs in black and 
v^hite mosaic, after cartoons by Beccafumi. The patient 
skill of these compositions makes them a really superb 
piece of decoration ; but even here the friend whom I 
lately quoted refused to relish this over-ripe fruit of 
the Sienese school. The designs are nonsensical, he 
declares, and all his admiration is for the cunning arti- 
sans who have imitated the hatchings and shadings 
and hair-strokes of the pencil by the finest curves of 
inserted black stone. But the true romance of handi- 
work at Siena is to be seen in the superb stalls of the 
choir, under the colored light of the great wheel- 
window. Wood-carving is an historic specialty of the 
city, and the best masters of the art during the fifteenth 
century bestowed their skill on this exquisite enter- 
prise. It is like the frost-work on one's window-panes 
interpreted in polished oak. I have rarely seen a more 
vivid and touching embodiment of the peculiar patience 
of mediaeval craftsmanship. Into such artistry as this 
the author seems to put more of his personal substance 
than into any other ; he has not only to wrestle with his 
subject, but with his material. He is richly fortunate 
when his subject is charming — when his devices, in- 
ventions, and fantasies spring lightly to his hand ; for 
in the material itself, when age and use have ripened 
and polished and darkened it to the richness of ebony 
and to a greater warmth, there is something surpass- 
ingly delectable and venerable. Wander behind the 
altar at Siena when the chanting is over and the in- 
cense has faded, and look at the stalls of the Barili. 



THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE. 

Florence, November 15, 1873. 

FLOEENCE, too, has its " season " as well as Eome, 
and I have been taking some satisfaction, for the 
past- six weeks, in the thought that it has not yet 
begun. Coming here in the first days of October, I 
found the summer lingering on in almost untempered 
force, and ever since, until within a day or two, it has 
been dying a very gradual death. Properly enough, 
as the city of flowers, Florence is delightful in the 
spring — during those blossoming weeks of March and 
April, when a six months' steady shivering has not 
shaken ]N"ew York and Boston free of the grip of 
winter. But something in the mood of autumn seems 
to suit peculiarly the mood in which an appreciative 
tourist strolls through these many-memoried streets 
and galleries and churches. Old things, old places, 
old people (or, at least, old races) have always seemed 
to me to tell their secrets more freely in such moist, 
gray, melancholy days as have formed the complexion 
of the past October. With Christmas comes the win- 
ter, the opera (the good opera), the gayeties, American 
and other. Meanwhile, it is pleasant enough, for per- 
sons fond of the Florentine flavor, that the opera is 



270 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

indifferent, that the Americans have not all arrived, 
and that the weather has a monotonous, overcast soft- 
ness, extremely favorable to contemplative habits. 
There is no crush on the Cascine, as on the sunny 
days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward 
the mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being- 
looked at as a good picture in a bad light. 'No light 
could be better to my eyes ; it seems the faded light 
of that varied past on which an observer here spends 
so many glances. There are people, I know, who freely 
intimate that the Florentine flavor I speak of is dead 
and buried, and that it is an immense misfortune not 
to have tasted it in the Grand Duke's time. Some 
of these friends of mine have been living here ever 
since, and have seen the little historic city expanding 
in the hands of its "enterprising" syndic into* its 
shining girdle of boulevards and heaux quartiers, such 
as M. Haussmann set the fashion of — like some pre- 
cious little page of antique text swallowed up in a 
marginal commentary. I am not sure of the real 
wisdom of regretting the change — apart from its being 
always good sense to prefer a larger city to a smaller 
one. For Florence, in its palmy days, was peculiarly 
a city of change — of shifting regimes, and policies, 
and humors ; and the Florentine character, as we have 
it to-day, is a character which takes all things easily 
for having seen so many come and go. It saw the 
national capital arrive, and took no further thought 
than sufficed for the day ; it saw it depart, and whis- 
tled it cheerfully on its way to Eome. The new boule- 
vards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but 



THE AUTUMN IN FLOEENCE. 271 

they don't go ; but after all, from the sesthetic point 
of view, it is not strictly necessary they should. It 
seems to me part of the essential amiability of Flor- 
ence — of her genius for making you take to your favor 
on easy terms everything that in any way belongs to 
her — that she has already flung a sort of reflet of 
her charm over all their undried mortar and plaster. 
Nothing could be prettier, in* a modern way, than the 
Piazza d'Azeolio, or the Avenue of the Princess Mar- 
garet ; nothing pleasanter than to stroll across them, 
and enjoy the afternoon lights through their liberal 
vistas. They carry you close to the charming hills 
which look down into Florence on all sides, and if, in 
the foreground, your sense is a trifle perplexed by the 
white pavements, dotted here and there with a police- 
man or a nurse-maid, you have only to look just beyond 
to see Fiesole on its mountain-side glowing purple 
from the opposite sunset. 

Turning back into Florence proper, you have local 
color enough and to spare — which you enjoy the more, 
doubtless, from standing off to get your light and your 
point of view. The elder streets, abutting on all this 
newness, go boring away into the heart of the city in 
narrow, dusky vistas of a fascinating picturesqueness. 
Pausing to look down them, sometimes, and to pene- 
trate the deepening shadows through which they re- 
cede, they seem to me little corridors leading out from 
the past, as mystical as the ladder in Jacob's dream ; 
and when I see a single figure coming up toward me 
I am half afraid to wait till it arrives; it seems too 
much like a ghost — a messenger from an under-world. 



272 TEANSATL ANTIC SKETCHES. 

riorence, paved with its great mosaics of slabs, and 
lined with its massive Tuscan palaces, which, in their 
large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of 
effect, reproduce more than other modern styles the 
simple nobleness of Greek architecture, must have 
always been a stately city, and not especially rich in 
that ragged picturesqueness — the picturesqueness of 
poverty — on which we feast our idle eyes at Eome 
and Naples. Except in the unfinished fronts of the 
churches, which, however, unfortunately, are mere pro- 
saic ugliness, one finds here less romantic shabbiness 
than in most Italian cities. But at two or three points 
it exists in perfection — in just such perfection as 
proves that often what is literally hideous may be 
constructively delightful. On the north side of the 
Arno, between the Ponte Yecchio and the Ponte Santa 
Trinita, is an ancient row of houses, backing on the 
river, 'in whose yellow flood they bathe their aching 
old feet. Anything more battered and befouled, more 
cracked and disjointed, dirtier, drearier, shabbier, it 
would be impossible to conceive. They look as if, 
fifty years ago, the muddy river had risen over their 
chimneys, and then subsided again and left them 
coated forever with its unsightly slime. And yet, 
forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is 
yellow, and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow, 
mouldering surface, some hint of color, some accident 
of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and repeats 
the note — because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, 
and you are a magnanimous Yankee, bred amid the 
micaceous sparkle of brown-stone fronts and lavish of 



THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE. 273 

enthusiasm, these miserable dwellings, instead of simply- 
suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board 
of health, bloom and glow all along the line in the 
perfect felicity of picturesqueness. Lately, during the 
misty autumn nights, the moon has been shining on 
them faintly, and refining away their shabbiness into 
something ineffably strange and spectral. The yellow 
river sweeps along without a sound, and the pale tene- 
ments hano' above it like a vao;ue miasmatic exhalation. 
The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor 
is singing his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a 
more dreamily fictitious world. 

What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the 
charm of Florence is difficult to say in a few words; 
yet as one wanders hither and thither in quest of a 
picture or a bas-relief, it seems no marvel that the 
place should be interesting. Two industrious English 
ladies have lately published a couple of volumes of 
"Walks" through the Florentine streets, and their 
work is a long enumeration of great artistic deeds. 
These things remain for the most part in sound pres- 
ervation, and, as the weeks go by and you spend a 
constant portion of your days among them, you seem 
really to be living in the magical time. It was not 
long ; it lasted, in its splendor, for less than a century ; 
but it has stored away in the palaces and churches 
of Florence a heritage of beauty which these three 
enjoying centuries since have not yet come to the 
end of This forms a distinct intellectual atmosphere, 
into which you may turn aside from the modern world 
and fill your lungs with the breath of a forgotten creed. 

12* K 



274 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

The memorials of the past in Florence have the ad- 
vantage of being somehow more cheerful and exhilar- 
ating than in other cities which have had a great 
aesthetic period. Venice, with her old palaces crack- 
ing with the weight of their treasures, is, in its influ- 
ence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her maimed 
marbles and dishonored memories, transmutes the 
consciousness of sensitive observers, I am told, into a 
chronic heartache. But in one's impression of old 
Florence there is something very sound and sweet 
and wholesome — something which would make it a 
growing pleasure to live here long. In Athens and 
Venice, surely, a long residence would be a pain. The 
reason of this is partly the peculiarly lovable, gentle 
character of Florentine art in general — partly the 
tenderness of time, in its lapse, which, save in a few 
cases, has been as sparing of injury as if it knew that 
when it had dimmed and corroded these charming 
things, it would have nothing so sweet again for its 
tooth to feed on. If the beautiful Ghirlandaios and 
Lippis are fading, this generation will never know it. 
The large Fra Angelico in the Academy is as clear and 
keen as if the good old monk were standing there 
wiping his brushes ; the colors seem to sing, as it were, 
like new-fledged birds in June. N'othing is more char- 
acteristic of early Tuscan art than the bas-reliefs of 
Luca della Eobbia ; yet, save for their innocence, there 
is not one of them that mioiit not have been modelled 
yesterday. The color is mild but not faded, < the forms 
are simple but not archaic. But perhaps the best 
image of the absence of stale melancholy in Florentine 



THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE. 275 

antiquity is the bell-toM^er of Giotto beside the Cathe- 
dral. ISTo traveller has forgotten how it stands there, 
straight and slender, plated with colored marbles, seem- 
ing so strangely rich in the common street. It is not 
even simple in design, and I never cease to wonder 
that the painter of so many grimly archaic little fres- 
cos should have fashioned a building which, in the 
way of elaborate elegance, leaves the finest modern 
culture nothing to suggest. ]N"othing can be imagined 
at once more lightly and more richly fanciful ; it might 
have been a present, ready-made, to the city by some 
Oriental genie. Yet, with its Eastern look, it seems 
of no particular time ; it is not gray and hoary like a 
Gothic spire, nor cracked and despoiled like a Greek 
temple; its marbles shine so little less freshly than 
when they were laid together, and the sunset lights 
up its embroidered cornice with such a friendly ra- 
diance, that you come to regard it at last as simply 
the graceful, indestructible soul of the city made visi- 
ble. The Cathedral, externally, in spite of its solemn 
hugeness, strikes the same light, cheerful note ; it has 
grandeur, of course, but such a pleasant, agreeable, in- 
genuous grandeur. It has seen so much, and outlived 
so much, and served so many sad purposes, and yet 
remains in aspect so true to the gentle epicureanism 
that conceived it. Its vast, many-colored marble walls 
are one of the sweetest entertainments of Florence ; 
there is an endless fascination in walking past them, 
and feeling them lift their great acres of mosaic higher 
in the air than you care to look. You greet them as 
you do the side of a mountain when you are walking 



276 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

in the valley ; you don't twist back your head to look 
at the top, but content yourself with some little nest- 
ling hollow — some especial combination of the marble 
dominos. 

Florence is richer in pictures than one really knows 
until one has begun to look for them in outlying corners. 
Then, here and there, one comes upon treasures, which 
it almost seems as if one might pilfer for the New York 
Museum without their being missed. The Pitti Palace, 
of course, is a collection of masterpieces; they jostle 
each other in their splendor, and they rather weary your 
admiration. The Uftizi is almost as fine a show, and 
together with that long serpentine artery which crosses 
the Arno and connects them, they form the great cen- 
tral treasure-chamber of the city. But I have been 
neglecting them of late for the sake of the Academy, 
where there are fewer copyists and tourists, fewer of 
the brilliant things you do not care for. I observed 
here, a day or two since, lurking obscurely in one of 
the smaller rooms, a most enchanting Sandro Botticelli. 
It had a mean black frame, and it was hung where no 
one would have looked for a masterpiece ; but a good 
glass brought out its merits. It represented the walk 
of Tobias with the Angel, and there are parts of it really 
that an angel might have painted. Placed as it is, I 
doubt whether it is noticed by half a dozen persons a 
year. What a pity that it should not become the prop- 
erty of an institution which would give it a brave gilded 
frame and a strong American light ! Then it might 
shed its wonderful beauty with all the force of rare 
example. Botticelli is, in a certain way, the most inter- 



THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE. 277 

esting of the Florentine painters — the only one, save 
Leonardo and Michael Angelo, who had a really in- 
ventive fancy. His imagination has a complex turn 
which gives him at first a strangely modern, familiar 
air, but we soon discover that what we know of him is 
what our contemporary Pre-Eaphaelites have borrowed. 
When we read Mr. William Morris's poetry, when we 
look at Mr. Eossetti's pictures, we are enjoying, among 
other things, a certain amount of diluted Botticelli. He 
endeavored much more than the other early Florentines 
to make his faces express a mood, a consciousness, and 
it is the beautiful preoccupied type of face which we 
find in his pictures that our modern Pre-Eaphaelites 
reproduce, with their own modifications. Fra Angelico, 
Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, were not imaginative ; but 
who was ever more devotedly observant, more richly, 
genially graphic ? If there shorrld ever be a great weed- 
ing out of the world's possessions, I should pray that 
the best works of the early Florentine school be counted 
among the flowers. With the ripest performances of 
the Venetians, they seem to me the most valuable things 
in the history of art. Heaven forbid that we should be 
narrowed down to a cruel choice ; but if it came to a 
question of keeping or losing between half a dozen 
Eaphaels and half a dozen things I could select at the 
Academy, I am afraid that, for myself, the memory 
of the " Transfiguration " would not save the Eaphaels. 
And yet this was not the opinion of a patient artist 
whom I saw the other day copying the finest of Ghir- 
landaios — a beautiful " Adoration of the Kings " at 
the Hospital of the Innocenti. This is another speci- 



278 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

men of the buried art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in 
a dusky chapel, far aloft, behind an altar, and, though 
now and then a stray tourist wanders in and puzzles 
awhile over the vaguely glowing forms, the picture is 
never really seen and enjoyed. I found an aged French- 
man of modest mien perched on the little platform 
beneath it, behind a great hedge of altar candlesticks, 
with an admirable copy almost completed. The diffi- 
culties of his task had been almost insuperable, and his 
performance seemed to me a real feat of magic. He 
could scarcely see or move, and he could only find room 
for his canvas by rolling it together and painting a small 
piece at a time, so that he never enjoyed a view of his 
work as a whole. The original is gorgeous with color 
and bewildering with ornamental detail, but not a gleam 
of the painter's crimson was wanting, not a curl in his 
gold arabesques. It seemed to me that if I had copied 
a Ghirlandaio under such circumstances, I would at 
least maintain, for my credit, that he was the first painter 
in the world. " Very good of its kind," said the weary 
old man, with a shrug, in reply to my raptures ; " but 
0, how far short of Eaphael ! " However that may be, 
if the reader ever observes this brilliant copy in the 
Museum of Copies in Paris, let him stop before it with 
a certain reverence ; it is one of the patient things of 
art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky chapel, in 
such scanty convenience, seemed to remind me that the 
old art-life of Florence was not yet extinct. The old 
painters are dead, but their influence is living. 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 

February -April, 1874. 
I. 

YESTEEDAY that languid organism known as the 
Florentine Carnival put on a momentary sem- 
blance of vigor, and decreed a general corso through 
the town. The spectacle was not brilliant, but it sug- 
gested some natural reflections. I encountered the line 
of carriages in the square before Santa Croce, of which 
they were making the circuit. They rolled solemnly 
by, with their inmates frowning forth at each other in 
apparent wrath at not finding each other more amusing. 
There were no masks, no costumes, no decorations, no 
throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was as if each 
carriageful had privately resolved to be inexpensive, and 
was rather discomfited at finding that it was getting 
no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of 
the piazza was filled with little tables, with shouting 
mountebanks, mostly disguised in battered bonnets and 
crinolines, offering chances in raffles for plucked fowls 
and kerosene lamps. I have never thought the huge 
marble statue of Dante, which overlooks the scene, a 
work of the last refinement ; but, as it stood there on 
its high pedestal, chin in hand, frowning down on all 



280 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

this cheap foolery, it seemed to have a great moral in- 
tention. The carriages followed a prescribed course — 
through the Via Ghibellina, the Proconsolo, past the 
Badia and the Bargello, beneath the great tessellated 
cliffs of the Cathedral, through the Tornabuoni, and out 
into ten minutes' sunshine beside the Arno. Much of 
all this is the gravest and stateliest part of Florence ; 
and there was an almost ludicrous incongruity in see- 
ing Pleasure leading her train through these dusky 
historic streets. It was most uncomfortably cold, and, 
in the absence of masks, many a fair nose was fantas- 
tically tipped with purple. But, as the carriages crept 
solemnly along, they seemed to me to be keeping a 
funeral march — to be following an antique custom, 
an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is dead, 
and these good people who had come abroad to make 
merry were to an observant sense no better than funeral 
mutes and grave-diggers. Last winter in Eome it 
seemed to me to have but a galvanized life ; but, com- 
pared with this humble exhibition, it was quite operatic. 
At Eome, indeed, it was too operatic. The knights on 
horseback were a bevy of circus-riders, and I 'm sure 
that half the mad revellers repaired every night to the 
Capitol for their twelve sous a day. 

I have just been reading over the letters of the Pres- 
ident de Brosses. A hundred years ago, in Venice, the 
Carnival lasted six months ; and at Eome for many 
weeks each year one was free to perpetrate the most 
fantastic follies, and cultivate the most remunerative 
vices under cover of a mask. It 's very well to read the 
President's anecdotes, which are capitally told ; but I 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 281 

do not see, certainly, why we should expect the Italians 
to perpetuate a style of manners which we ourselves, if 
we had any responsibilities in the matter, should find 
intolerable. At any rate, the Florentines spend no 
more money nor faith on the carnivalesque. And yet 
this is not strictly true ; for what struck me in the 
whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these observa- 
tions, was not at all the more or less of costume of the 
people in the carriages, but the obstinate survival of 
the merrymaking instinct in the Florentine population. 
There could be no better example of it than that so 
dim a shadow of entertainment should keep all Flor- 
ence standing and strolling, densely packed, for hours in 
the cold streets. There was nothing to see that might 
not be seen on the Cascine any fine day in the year — 
nothing but a name, a tradition, a pretext for sweet, 
staring idleness. The faculty of making much of com- 
mon things and converting small occasions into great 
pleasures is to an American traveller the most salient 
characteristic of the so-called Latin civilizations. It 
charms him and vexes him, according to his mood ; and 
for the most part it seems to represent a moral gulf 
between his own national temperament and that of 
Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery 
leagues which a steamer may annihilate. But I think 
his mood is wisest when he accepts it as the sign of 
an unconscious philosophy of life, instilled by the ex- 
perience of centuries — the philosophy of people who 
have lived long and much, who have discovered no 
short cuts to happiness and no effective circumvention 
of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as 



282 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

a ponderous fact, which may be lightened by a liberal 
infusion of sensuous diversion. All Florence yesterday 
was taking its holiday in a natural, placid fashion, 
which seemed to make its own temper an affair quite 
independent of the splendor of the compensation de- 
creed on a higher line to the weariness of its legs. 
That the co7'so was stupid or lively was its own glory 
or shame. Common Florence, on the narrow footways, 
pressed against the houses, obeyed a natural need in 
looking about complacently, patiently, gently, and 
never pushing, nor trampling, nor swearing, nor stag- 
gering. This liberal margin for festivals in Italy gives 
the masses a sort of man-of-the- world urbanity in tak- 
ing their pleasure. 

Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote 'New 
England fireside an unsophisticated young person of 
either sex is reading in an old volume of travels or an 
old romantic tale an account of that glittering festival 
called the Carnival, celebrated in old Catholic lands. 
Across the page swims a vision of sculptured palace 
fronts, draped in crimson and gold and shining in a 
southern sun ; of a motley train of maskers, sweep- 
ing on in voluptuous confusion and pelting each other 
with nosegays and love-letters. Into the quiet room, 
quenching the rhythm of the Yankee pendulum, there 
floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of stir- 
ring foreign sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a 
strangely alien cadence. But the dusk is falling, and 
the unsophisticated young person closes the book wea- 
rily and wanders to the window. The dusk is falling 
on the beaten snow. Down the road is a white wooden 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 283 

meeting-house, looking gray among the drifts. The 
young person surveys the prospect awhile, and then 
wanders back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of 
Venice, of Florence, of Eome ; color and costume, ro- 
mance and rapture ! The young person gazes in the 
firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro of the future, dis- 
cerns at last the glowing phantasm of opportunity, and 
determines, with a heart-beat, to go and see it all — 
twenty years hence ! 

II. 

A COUPLE of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came 
back by the castle of Vincigiiata. The afternoon was 
lovely ; and, though there is as yet (February 10) no 
visible revival of vegetation, the air was full of a vague 
vernal perfume, and the warm colors of the hills and 
the yellow western sunlight flooding the plain seemed 
to contain the promise of Nature's return to grace. It 
is true that above the distant pale blue gorge of Vallom- 
brosa the mountain-line was tipped with snow ; but the 
liberated soul of Spring was abroad, nevertheless. The 
view from Fiesole seems vaster and richer with each 
visit. The hollow in which Florence lies, and which 
from below seems deep and contracted, opens out into 
an immense and generous valley and leads away the 
eye into a hundred gradations of distance. Florence 
lay amid her checkered fields and gardens, with as 
many towers and spires as a chess-board half cleared. 
The domes and towers were washed over with a faint 
blue mist. The scattered columns of smoke, interfused 



284 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

with the sinking sunlight, hung over them like stream- 
ers and pennons of silver gauze ; and the Arno, twisting 
and curling and glittering here and there, looked like a 
serpent, cross-striped with silver. 

Vincigiiata is a product of the millions, the leisure, 
and the eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English 
gentleman — Mr. Temple Leader. His name should 
be commemorated. You reach the castle from Fiesole 
by a narrow road, returning toward Florence by a ro- 
mantic detour through the hills, and passing nothing 
on its way save thin plantations of cypress and cedar. 
Upward of twenty years ago, I believe, this gentleman 
took a fancy to the crumbling shell of a mediseval for- 
tress on a breezy hill-top overlooking the Val d'Arno, 
and forthwith bought it and began to " restore " it. I do 
not know what the original ruin cost ; but in the dusky 
courts and chambers of the present elaborate structure 
this valiant archaeologist must have buried a fortune. 
He has, however, the compensation of feeling that he 
has erected a monument which, if it is never to stand 
a feudal siege, may challenge, at least, the keenest mod- 
ern criticism. It is a disinterested work of art and 
really a triumph of aesthetic culture. The author has 
reproduced with minute accuracy a sturdy home-fortress 
of the fourteenth century, and has kept throughout such 
rigid terms with his model that the place is literally 
uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a 
massive fac-simile, an elegant museum of domestic 
architecture, perched on a spur of the Apennines. The 
place is most politely shown. There is a charming 
cloister, painted wath extremely clever archaic frescos. 



FLOEENTINE NOTES. 285 

celebrating tlie deeds of the founders of the castle — 
most picturesque and characteristic and mediaeval, but 
desperately frigid and unavailable. There is a beau- 
tiful castle court, with the embattled tower climbing 
into the blue, far above it ; and a spacious loggia, with 
ruf:^gjed medallions and mild-hued Luca della Eobbias 
fastened unevenly into the walls. But the apartments 
are the great success, and each of them is as good a 
" reconstruction " as a tale of Walter Scott ; or, to speak 
frankly, a much better one. They are all low-beamed 
and vaulted, stone-paved, decorated in grave colors, and 
lighted from narrow, deeply recessed windows, through 
small, leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass. 

The details are most ingenious and picturesque, and 
the in-door atmosphere of medisevalism most forcibly 
revived. It was a terribly cold and dusky atmosphere, 
apparently, and helps to account for many of the pecul- 
iarities of mediaeval manners. There are oaken benches 
round the room, of about six inches in depth ; and 
grim fauteuils of wrought leather, illustrating the sup- 
pressed transitions which, as George Eliot says, unite 
all contrasts — offering a visible link between the mod- 
ern conceptions of torture and of luxury. There are 
no fireplaces anywhere but in the kitchen, where a 
couple of sentry-boxes are inserted on either side of 
the great hooded chimney-piece, into which people 
might creep and take their turn at being toasted and 
smoked. I doubt whether this scarcity of fireplaces 
was general in feudal castles ; but it is a happy stroke 
in the representation of an Italian dwelling of any 
period. It proves that the graceful fiction that Italy 



286 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

is a winterless clime flourished for some time before 
being refuted by grumbling tourists. And yet amid 
this cold comfort you feel the incongruous presence of 
a constant intuitive regard for beauty. The shapely 
spring of the vaulted ceilings ; the richly figured walls, 
coarse and hard in substance as they are ; the chai-ming 
shapes of the great platters and flagons in the deep 
recesses of the quaintly carved black dressers ; the 
wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here 
and there for its own diversion in unlighted corners — 
these things prove that the unlettered gentlefolk of the 
Dark Ages had finer needs than the mere need for 
blows and beef and beer. 

And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vis- 
ion one fancies them passing their heavy eyes over 
such slender household beguilements ! These crepus- 
cular chambers at Yincigiiata are a mystery and a 
challenge ; they seem the mere propounding of a rid- 
dle. You long, as you wander through them, turning 
up your coat-collar and wondering whether ghosts can 
catch bronchitis, to answer it with some positive 
vision of what people did there, how they looked and 
talked and carried themselves, how they took their 
pains and pleasures, how they counted off the hours. 
Deadly ennui seems to ooze out of the stones and hang 
in clouds in the brown corners. 'No wonder men rel- 
ished a fight and panted for a fray. " Skull-smashers " 
were sweet, ears ringing with pain and ribs cracking in 
a tussle were soothing music, compared with the cruel 
quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they 
came back, I am sure they slept a good deal and eased 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 287 

their dislocated bones on those meagre oaken ledges. 
Then they woke up and turned about to the table and 
ate their portion of roasted sheep. They shouted at 
each other across the board, and flung the wooden 
plates at the serving-men. They jostled and hustled 
and hooted and bragged ; and then, after gorging and 
boozing and easing their doublets, they squared their 
elbows one by one on the greasy table, and buried their 
scarred foreheads and dreamed of a good gallop after 
flying foes. And the women ? They must have been 
strangely simple — simpler far than any moral archae- 
ologist can show us in a learned restoration. Of course, 
their simplicity had its graces and devices ; but one 
thinks with a sigh that, as the poor things turned away 
with patient looks from the viewless windows to the 
same, same looming figures on the dusky walls, they 
had not even the consolation of knowing that just this 
attitude and movement, set off by their peaked coifs, 
their falling sleeves, their heavy twisted trains, would 
be pronounced " picturesque " by an appreciative future. 
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to 
enter a tacit protest against too generous a patronage 
of pure aesthetics, in this starving and sinning world. 
One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful 
useless tilings. But the healthier state of mind, surely, 
is to lay no tax on any really intelligent manifesta- 
tion of the curious and exquisite. Intelligence hangs 
together essentially, all along the line ; it only needs 
time to make, as it were, its connections. This elaborate 
piece of imitation has no superficial use ; but, even if 
it were less complete, less successful, less brilliant. I 



288 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

should feel a reflective kindness for it. So handsome 
a piece of work is its own justification ; it belongs to 
the heroics of culture. 

III. 

I SHOULD call the collection of pictures at the Pitti 
Palace splendid, rather than interesting. After walking 
through it once or twice, you catch the key in which 
it is pitched — you know what you are likely to find 
on closer examination. You feel that you will find 
none of the works of the uncompromising period, as 
one may say ; nothing from the half-groping geniuses 
of the early time, whose coloring was sometimes harsh 
and their outlines sometimes angular. I am ignorant 
of the principle on which the pictures were originally 
gathered and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who 
chiefly selected them. A princely creed I should 
roughly call it — the creed of people who believed in 
things presenting a fine face to society ; who esteemed 
brilliant results, rather than curious processes, and 
would have hardly cared more to admit into their 
collection a work by one of the laborious precursors 
of the full efflorescence than to see a bucket and broom 
left standing in a state saloon. The gallery contains 
in literal fact some eight or ten paintings of the early 
Tuscan School — notably two admirable specimens of 
Pilippo Lippi and one of the frequent circular pic- 
tures of the great Botticelli — a Madonna, chilled with 
tragic prescience, laying a pale cheek against that of a 
blighted Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this of 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 289 

Botticelli would have strangled her baby in its cradle 
to rescue it from the future. But of Botticelli there 
is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is perhaps 
his masterpiece — a Madonna in a small rose-garden 
(such a " flowery close " as Mr. "William Morris writes 
of), leaning over an Infant, who kicks his little human 
heels on the grass, while half a dozen little curly- 
pated angels gather about him, looking back over their 
shoulders with the naivete of children in tableaux 
vivants, and one of them drops an armful of gathered 
roses one by one upon the baby. The delightful earth- 
ly innocence of these winged youngsters is quite inex- 
pressible. Their heads are twisted about toward the 
spectator, as if they were playing at leap-frog and 
were expecting a companion to come and take a jump. 
Never did intellectual simplicity attempt with greater 
success to depict simplicity. But these three fine works 
are hung over the tops of doors, in a dark back room 
— the bucket and broom are thrust behind a curtain. 
It seems to me, nevertheless, that a fine Filippo Lippi 
is good enough company for an AUori or a Cigoli, 
and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli 
might happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility 
of Eaphael's Madonna of the Chair. 

Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what 
it pretends to be, how impressive it is, how sumptuous, 
how truly grand-ducal ! It is chiefly official art, as one 
may say; but it presents the fine side of the type — 
the brilliancy, the facility, the amplitude, the sover- 
eignty of good taste. I agree, on the whole, with X , 

and with what he recently said about his own humor 

13 s 



290 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

on these matters ; that, having been, on his first ac- 
quaintance with pictures, nothing if not critical, and 
thought the lesson was incomplete and the opportunity 
slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he had 
come, as he grew older, to regard them more as an en- 
tertainment and less as a solemnity, and to remind 
himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to make 
us relish the human mind, and not to make us pat- 
ronize it. We do, in fact, as we grow older, un- 
string the critical bow a little and strike a truce with 
invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile im- 
pulse to heated partisanship, and discover that one 
spontaneous producer is not different enough from 
another to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling 
over our loves and our aversions. We perceive a cer- 
tain human solidarity in all cultivated effort, and are 
conscious of a growing urbanity in our judgments ■ — a 
sort of man-of-the-world disposition to take the joke 
for what it is worth, as it passes. We have, in short, 
less of a quarrel with the masters we don't delight in, 
and less of an impulse to renew the oath of eternal 
friendship wdth those in whom, in more zealous days, 
we fancied that we discovered peculiar meanings. 
The meanings no longer seem quite so peculiar. Since 
then we have discovered a few in the depths of our 
own genius which are not sensibly less valuable. 

And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly 
upon one's mood — as a traveller's impressions do, gen- 
erally, to a degree which those who give them to the 
world would do well more explicitly to declare. We 
have our moods of mental expansion and contraction, 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 291 

and yet while we follow the traveller's trade we go about 
gazing and judging with unadjusted confidence. We 
cannot suspend judgment; we must take our notes, 
and the notes are florid or crabbed, as the case may be. 
A short time ago I spent a week in an ancient city on 
a hill- top, in the humor, for which I was not to blame, 
which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the time ; 
but I could not help it. I went through all the views 
of liberal appreciation ; I uncapped in all the churches, 
and on the crumbling ramparts stared all the views 
fairly out of countenance ; but my imagination, which 
I suppose at bottom had very good reasons of its own 
and knew perfectly what it was about, refused to pro- 
ject into the dark old town and upon the yellow hills 
that sympathetic glow which forms half the substance 
of our genial impressions. So it is that in museums 
and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. 
On some days we ask to be entertained ; on others, 
Euskin-haunted, to be edified. After a long absence 
from the Pitti Palace, I went back there the other 
morning, and transferred myself from chair to chair in 
the great golden-roofed saloons (the chairs are all gild- 
ed and covered with faded silk), in the humor to be 
diverted, at any price. I need not mention the things 
that diverted me. I yawn now when I think of some 
of them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my 
kindlier judgment has made permanent concessions is 
that charming Andrea del Sarto. When I first knew 
him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing 
that I did n't like him. Cet age est sans pitie. The 
fine, harmonious, melancholy, pleasing painter! He 



292 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

has a dozen faults, and if you insist upon your rights, 
the conclusive word you use about him will be the word 
weak. But if you are a generous soul you will utter it 
low — low as the mild, grave tone of his own impressive 
coloring. He is monotonous, narrow, incomplete; he 
has but a dozen different figures, and but two or three 
ways of distributing them ; he seems able to utter but 
half his thought, and his pictures lack, apparently, some 
final working-over, which would have made them 
stronger — some process which his impulse failed him 
before he could bestow. And yet, in spite of these 
limitations, his genius is both itself of the great pattern 
and lighted by the atmosphere of a great period. Three 
gifts he had largely : an instinctive, unaffected, uner- 
ring grace ; an admirable color (in a limited range) ; 
and, best of all, the look of moral agitation. Whether 
he had the thing or not, or in what measure, I cannot 
say ; but he certainly communicates the tendency. Be- 
fore his handsome, vague-browed Madonnas ; the mild, 
robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and 
look round at you with a rich simplicity which seems 
to say that, though in the picture, they are not of it, 
but of your own sentient life of commingled love and 
weariness ; the stately apostles, with comely heads and 
harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated 
Virgin like early astronomers at a newly seen star — 
there comes to you a kind of dusky reflection of the 
painter's moral experience. Morality, perhaps, is too 
pedantic a name for Andrea del Sarto's luxurious 
gravity. I should be careful how I bestow the word, 
among all these zealous votaries of the serene delight 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 293 

of the eyes ; but his idea seems always somehow to cast 
a vague shadow, and in the shadow you feel the chill 
of moral suffering. Did the Lippis suffer, father or 
son ? Did Eaphael suffer ? Did Titian ? Did Eubens 
suffer ? I doubt it. And I note that our poor second- 
rate Andrea del Sarto has an element of interest absent 
from a number of stronger talents. 

Interspaced with him at the Pitti hang the stronger 
and the weaker talents in splendid abundance. Eaph- 
ael is there, strong in portraiture — easy, various, boun- 
tiful genius that he was — and (strong here is not the 
word, but) happy beyond the common dream in his beau- 
tiful Madonna of the Chair. The general instinct of 
posterity seems to have been to treat this lovely picture 
as a kind of semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, manifes- 
tation. People stand in a worshipful silence before it, 
as they would before a taper-studded shrine. Suspend, 
in imagination, on one side of it the solid, realistic, 
unidealized portrait of Leo the Tenth (which hangs in 
another room), and transport to the other the fresco of 
the School of Athens from the Vatican, and then reflect 
that these were three diverse fancies of a single youth- 
ful, amiable genius, and you '11 admit that that genius 

was one of the rarest the world has held. X has 

a phrase that he " does n't care for Eaphael " ; but he 
confesses, when pressed, that he was a most remarkable 
young man. 

Titian has a dozen portraits, of unequal interest. I 
never particularly noticed till lately (it is very ill-hung) 
that portentous image of the Emperor Charles the 
Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing personage 



294 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

than I supposed, and in his great puffed sleeves and 
gold chains and full-skirted overdress he looks like 
a monarch whose tread might sometimes have been 
inconveniently resonant. But the j^^^^rpose to have his 
way and work his will is there — the great stomach for 
divine right, the old monarchical temperament. The 
great Titian, in portraiture, however, remains that for- 
midable young man in black, with the small, compact 
head, the delicate nose, and the irascible blue eye. 
Who was he ? What was he ? " Bitratto virile " is 
all the catalogue is able to call the picture. "Vi- 
rile ) " I should think it was. You may weave 
what romance you please about it; but a romance 
your conjecture must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, 
passionate, dangerous, it was not his own fault if he 
had no adventures. He was a gentleman and a war- 
rior, and his adventures balanced between camp and 
court. I imagine him the young orphan of a noble 
house, about to come into mortgaged estates. I should 
not have cared to be his guardian, bound to paternal 
admonitions once a month as to his precocious transac- 
tions with the Jews, or his scandalous abduction from . 
her convent of the Contessina So-and-So. 

The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian's golden- 
toned groups ; but it boasts a lovely composition by 
Paul Veronese, the dealer in silver hues — a Baptism 

of Christ. W said the other day, that it was the 

picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems 
here to be frankly an interpreter and ministrant of joy. 
The picture bedims and enfeebles its neighbors. I 
doubt whether painting, as such, can go further. It is 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 295 

simply that here at last the art stands complete. The 
early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Eaphael, as Mi- 
chael, saw the great spectacle in beautiful, sharp-edged 
elements and parts. The great Venetians felt its indis- 
soluble unity and perceived that form and color and 
earth and air were equal members of every possible sub- 
ject; and beneath their magical touch the hard outlines 
melted together and the blank intervals bloomed with 
meaning. In this beautiful Paul Veronese everything 
is part of the charm — the atmosphere as well as the 
figures, the look of radiant morning in the white- 
streaked sky as well as the beautiful human limbs, the 
cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ 
as well as the eloquent humility of his attitude. The 
relation to Nature of the other Italian schools differs 
from that of the Venetians as courtship — even ardent 
courtship — differs from marriage. 

Was Eubens lawfully married to Nature, or did he 
merely keep up the most unregulated of flirtations ? 
Three or four of his great carnal cataracts ornament the 
walls of the Pitti. If the union was really solemnized 
it must be said that the menage was at best a stormy 
one. He is a strangely irresponsible jumble of the true 
and the false. He paints a full flesh surface that radi- 
ates and palpitates with illusion, and into the midst of 
it he thrusts a mouth, a nose, an eye, which you would 
call your latest-born a blockhead for perpetrating. But 
if you want breathless vigor, hit or miss, taking your 
ticket at a venture, as in a carnival raffle or on an Eng- 
lish railway, here you have it. 



296 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

IV. 

I WENT the other day to the suppressed Convent of 
San Marco, paid my franc at the profane little wicket 
which creaks away at the door (no less than six custo- 
dians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it had 
a recusant conscience), passed along the bright, still 
cloister, and went in to look at Era Angelico's " Cruci- 
fixion," in that dusky chamber in the basement. I 
looked long ; one can hardly do otherwise. The fresco 
deals with pathos on the grand scale, and after per- 
ceiving its meaning you feel as little at liberty to 
go away abruptly as you would to leave church during 
the sermon. You may be as little of a formal Chris- 
tian as Era Angelico was much of one ; it yet seems a 
kind of intellectual duty to let so sincere a present- 
ment of the Christian story work its utmost purpose 
on your mind. The three crosses rise high against a 
strange crimson sky, which deepens mysteriously the 
tragic expression of the scene; but I confess to my 
inability to determine whether this lurid background 
is an intentional bit of picturesqueness, or simply a 
happy corruption of the original color. In the former 
case it is tragedy quite in the modern taste. Between 
the crosses, in no great composition, are scattered the 
most exemplary saints — kneeling, praying, weeping, 
pitying, worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is 
depicted at the left ; and this gives the gathered saints 
a strange appearance of being historically present at 
the actual scene. Everything is so real that you feel 
a vague impatience, and almost ask yourself how it was 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 297 

that amid the army of his consecrated servants the, 
Lord was permitted to suffer ? On reflection, you see 
that the painter's design, in so far as it is very definite, 
has been simply to offer a great representation of Pity. 
This was the emotion presumably most familiar to his 
own benignant spirit, and his colors here seem dissolved 
in softly-falling tears. Of this simple yearning com- 
passion the figures are all admirably expressive. N"o 
later painter learned to render with more masterly truth 
than Fra Angelico a single, concentrated, spiritual emo- 
tion. Immured in his quiet convent, he apparently 
never received an intelligible impression of evil ; and 
his conception of human life was a tender sense of per- 
petually loving and being loved. But how, immured 
in his quiet convent, away from the streets and the 
studios, did he become that genuine, finished, perfectly 
professional painter ? 'No one is less of a mere pietistic 
amateur. His range was broad, from this really heroic 
fresco to the little trumpeting seraphs, in their opaline 
robes, enamelled, as it were, on the gold margins of his 
pictures. 

I sat out the sermon, and departed, I hope, with the 
gentle preacher's blessing. I went into the smaller 
refectory, near by, to refresh my memory of the beau- 
tiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would 
be putting things roughly to say that I felt as if I had 
adjourned from a sermon to a comedy ; but one may 
certainly say that Ghirlandaio's theme, as contrasted 
with the blessed Angelico's, was the dramatic, spec- 
tacular side of human life. How keenly he observed 
it and how richly he rendered it, the world about him 

13* 



298 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

of color and costume, of handsome heads and pictorial 
groupings ! In his admirable school there is no painter 
one enjoys more largely and irresponsibly. Lippo 
Lippi is simpler, quainter, more frankly expressive ; 
but one looks at him with a remnant of the sympa- 
thetic discomfort provoked by all those early masters 
whose conceptions were still a trifle too large for their 
means. The pictorial vision in their minds seems to 
stretch and strain their undeveloped skill almost to a 
sense of pain. But in Ghirlandaio the skill and the 
imagination are equal, and he gives us a delightful 
impression of enjoying his own resources. Of all the 
painters of his time he seems to us the most modern. 
He enjoyed a crimson mantle spreading and tumbling 
in curious folds and embroidered with needlework of 
gold, just as he enjoyed a handsome, well-rounded 
head, with vigorous, dusky locks, profiled in courteous 
adoration. He enjoyed, in short, the various reality of 
things, and he had the good fortune to live at a time, 
when reality was sumptuous and picturesque. He was 
not especially addicted to giving spiritual hints ; and 
yet how hard and meagre they seem, the professed and 
finished realists of our own day, ungraced by that 
spiritual candor which makes half the richness of Ghir- 
landaio ! The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent 
example of the natural reverence of an artist of that 
time with whom reverence was not, as one may say, a 
specialty. The main idea with him has been the va- 
riety, the picturesqueness, the material charm of the 
scene, which finds expression, with irrepressible gener- 
osity, in the accessories of the background. Instinc- 



FLOEENTINE NOTES. 299 

tively lie imagines an opulent garden — imagines it 
with a good faith which quite tides him over the re- 
flection that Christ and his disciples were poor men 
and unused to sit at meat in palaces. Great full- 
fruited orange-trees peep over the wall before which 
the table is spread, strange birds fly through the air, 
and a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and 
looks down on the sacred repast. It is striking that, 
without any at all intense religious purpose, the figures, 
in their varied naturalness, have a dignity and sweet- 
ness of attitude which admits of numberless reverential 
constructions. I should call all this the happy tact of 
an unperturbed faith. 

On the staircase which leads up to the little 
painted cells of the Beato Angelico I suddenly faltered 
and paused. Somehow I had grown averse to the 
intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no 
more of him that day. I wanted no more macerated 
friars and spear-gashed sides. Ghirlandaio's elegant 
way of telling his story had put me in the humor for 
something more largely intelligent, more profanely 
beautiful. I departed, walked across the square, and 
found it in the Academy, standing in a certain spot 
and looking up at a certain high-hung picture. It is 
difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, 
of Sandro Botticelli. An accomplished critic (Mr. Pater, 
in his " Studies on the History of the Eenaissance ") 
has lately done so, on the whole more eloquently than 
conclusively. He was a most peculiar genius, and of all 
the multitudinous masters of his group incomparably 
the most interesting, the one who detains and perplexes 



300 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

and fascinates you most. Putting aside whatever 
seems too recondite in Mr. Pater's interpretation, it is 
evidence of the painter's power that he has furnished 
so fastidious a critic so inspiring a theme. A rigidly 
sufficient account of his genius is that his own imagi- 
nation was active, that his fancy was audacious and 
adventurous. Alone among the painters of his time, 
he seems to me to possess invention. The glow and 
tlirill of expanding observation — this was the feeling 
that sent his comrades to their easels ; but Botticelli 
had a faculty which loved to play tricks with the 
actual, to sport and wander and explore on its own 
account. These tricks are sometimes so ingenious and 
so lovely that it would be easy to talk nonsense about 
them. I hope it is not nonsense, however, to say that 
the picture to which I just alluded (the " Coronation of 
the Virgin," with a group of life-sized saints below and 
a garland of miniature angels above) is one of the su- 
premely beautiful productions of the human mind. It 
is hung so high that you need a good glass to see it ; 
to say nothing of the unprecedented delicacy of the 
work. The lower half of the picture is of moderate 
interest ; but the dance of hand-clasped angels round 
the heavenly couple above has a beauty newly exhaled 
from the deepest sources of inspiration. Their perfect 
little hands are locked with ineffable elegance ; their 
blowino; robes are tossed into folds of which each line 
is a study ; their charming feet have the relief of the 
most delicate sculpture. But, as I said before, of Botti- 
celli there is much, too much to say. Only add to this 
illimitable grace of design that his adventurous fancy 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 301 

goes a-Maying, not on wanton errands of its own, but 
on those of some mystic superstition which trembles 
forever in his heart. 



The more I look at the old Florentine domestic 
architecture the m^ore I like it — that of the great 
houses, at least ; and if I ever am able to build a stately 
dwelling for myself, I don't see how in conscience I can 
build it different from these. They are sombre and 
frowning, and look a trifle more as if they were meant 
to keep people out than to let them in; but I know 
no buildings more expressive of domiciliary dignity 
and security, with less of obtrusive and insubstantial 
pretension. They are impressively handsome, and yet 
they contrive to be so with the narrowest means. I 
don't say at the smallest cost ; that 's another matter. 
There is money buried in the thick walls and diffused 
through the echoing excess of space. The merchant 
nobles of the fifteenth century, I suppose, had money 
enough, though the present bearers of their names are 
glad to let out their palaces in suites of apartments 
which are occupied by the commercial aristocracy of 
another republic. I have been told of fine old moul- 
dering chambers of which I might enjoy possession 
for a sum not worth mentioning. I am afraid that 
in the depths of these stern-faced old houses there is a 
good deal of dusky discomfort, and I speak now simply 
of the stern faces themselves as you can see them from 
the street ; see them ranged cheek to cheek in the gray 



302 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

historic light of the Yia dei Bardi, the Via Maggio, the 
Via degli Albizzi. The stern expression depends on a 
few simple features : on the great iron-caged windows 
of the rough-hewn basement ; on the noble stretch of 
space between the summit of one high, round-topped 
window and the bottom of that above; on the high- 
hung sculptured shield at the angle of the house ; on 
the flat, far-projecting roof; and, finally, on the mag- 
nificent tallness of the whole building, which so dwarfs 
our modern attempts at size. The finest of these Flor- 
entine palaces are, I imagine, the tallest dwelling- 
houses in Europe. Some of those of M. Haussmann, 
in Paris, may climb very nearly as high ; but there is 
all the difference in the world between the impressive- 
ness of a building which takes breath, as it were, some 
six or seven times, from story to story, and of one 
which erects itself to an equal height in three long- 
drawn pulsations. When a house is ten windows 
wide and the drawing-room floor is as high as a chapel, 
it can afford to have but three stories. The spacious- 
ness of some of these ancient drawing-rooms savors 
almost of the ludicrous. The " family circle," gathered 
anywhere within speaking distance, must look like a 
group of pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little 

oasis of carpet. Mrs. G , living at the top of a 

house in that dusky, tortuous old Borgo Pinti, initiated 
me the other evening most good-naturedly, lamp in 
hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her apart- 
ment. Such quarters seem a translation into space of 
the old-fashioned idea of leisure. Leisure and " room " 
have been passing out of our manners together; but 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 303 

here and there, being of stouter structure, the latter 
lingers and survives. 

Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluc- 
tantly modern in spite alike of boasts and lamenta- 
tions, it seems to have been preserved for curiosity's 
and fancy's sake, with a vague, sweet odor of the 
embalmer's spices about it. I went the other morning 
to the Corsini Palace. The Corsinis, obviously, are 
great people. One of the ornaments of Eome is their 
great white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere, and 
its voluminous gallery, none the less picturesque for 
the pictures all being poor. Here they have a palace 
on the Arno, with another large, handsome, respect- 
able, uninteresting collection. It contains three or 
four fine pictures by early Florentines. It was not 
especially for the pictures that I went, however; and 
certainly not for the pictures that I stayed. I was in 

the same humor as X when we walked the other 

day through the beautiful residental apartments of the 
Pitti Palace. "I suppose I care for nature," he said. 
" I know there have been times when I have thought 
that the greatest pleasure in life was to lie under a 
tree and gaze away at blue hills. But just now I had 
rather lie on that faded sea-green satin sofa and gaze 
down through the open door at that retreating vista 
of gilded, deserted, haunted chambers. In other w^ords, 
I prefer a good 'interior' to a good landscape. It's 
a more concentrated pleasure. I like fine old rooms, 
tliat have been lived in in a large way. I like the 
musty upholstery, the antiquated knick-knacks, the 
view out of the tall, deep-embrasured windows at gar- 



304 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

den cypresses rocking against a gray sky. If you don't 
know why, I can't tell you." It seemed to me at the 
Palazzo Corsini that I did know why. In places that 
have been lived in so long and so much and in such 
a large way, as my friend said — that is, under social 
conditions so complex and, to an American sense, so 
curious — the past seems to have left a sensible de- 
posit, an aroma, an atmosphere. This ghostly presence 
tells you no secrets, but it prompts you to try and 
guess a few. What has been done and said here 
through so many years, what has been ventured or 
suffered, what has been dreamed or despaired of? 
Guess the riddle if you can, or if you think it worth 
your ingenuity. The rooms at the Palazzo Corsini 
suggest none but comfortable memories. One of them, 
indeed, seemed to me such a tranquil perfection of a 
room, that I lounged there until the old custodian came 
shuffling back to see whether, possibly, I was trying 
to conceal a Caravaggio about my person — a great 
crimson-draped drawing-room of the amplest and yet 
most charming proportions, with its walls hung with 
large dark pictures, its great concave ceiling frescoed 
and moulded with dusky richness, and half a dozen 
south windows looking out on the Arno, whose swift 
yellow tide sends up the light in a sort of cheerful 
flicker. I believe that, in my relish for this fine 
combination, I uttered a monstrous folly — some mo- 
mentary willingness to be maimed or crippled all my 
days if I might pass them in such a room as that. 
In fact, half the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious 
saloon would be that of using one's legs, of strolling 



FLORENTINE NOTES. dO^ 

up and down past the windows, one by one, and 
making desultory journeys from station to station and 
corner to corner. Near by is a colossal ball-room, 
domed and pilastered like a Eenaissance cathedral, 
and superabundantly decorated with marble effigies, 
all yellow and gray with the years. 



VI. 

In the Carthusian Monastery, outside the Eoman 
Gate, mutilated and profaned though it is, one may 
still gather a grateful sense of old Catholicism and old 
Italy. The road to it is ugly, being encumbered with 
vulgar wagons and fringed with tenements, suggestive 
of an Irish-American suburb. Your interest begins as 
you come in sight of the convent, perched on its little 
mountain and lifting against the sky, around the bell- 
tower of its gorgeous chapel, a kind of coronet of clus- 
tered cells. You make your way into the lower gate, 
through a clamoring press of deformed beggars, thrust- 
ing at you their stumps of limbs, and climb the steep 
hillside, through a shabby plantation, which it is proper 
to fancy was better tended in the monkish time. The 
monks are not totally abolished, the government hav- 
ing the grace to await the natural extinction of the 
half-dozen old brothers who remain, and who shuffle 
doggedly about the cloisters, looking, witli tlieir white 
robes and their pale, blank old faces, like anticipatory 
ghosts of their future selves. A prosaic, profane old 
man, in a coat and trousers, serves you, however, as 

T 



306 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

custodian. The melaiiclioly friars have not even the 
privilege of doing you the honors, as we may say, of 
their dishonor. One must imagine the pathetic effect 
of their silent pointings to this and that conventual 
treasure, emphasized by the feeling that such pointings 
were narrowly numbered. The convent is very vast 
and irregular, and full of that picturesqueness of 
detail which one notes as one lingers and passes, but 
which in Italy the overburdened memory learns to re- 
solve into broadly general images. I rather deplore its 
position, at the gates of a bustling city. It ought to be 
lodged in some lonely fold of the Apennines. And yet 
to look out from the shady porch of one of the quiet 
cells upon the teeming vale of the Arno and the clus- 
tered towers of Florence must have deepened the sense 
of monastic quietude. 

The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great 
proportions and designed by Andrea Orcagna, the 
primitive painter, is admirably handsome. Its massive 
cincture of black sculptured stalls, its dusky Gothic 
roof, its high-hung, deep-toned pictures, and its superb 
pavement of verd-antique and dark red marble, polislied 
into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures 
of the gathered friars into singularly picturesque relief 
All this luxury of worship has nov/here such value as 
in the chapels of monasteries, where one finds it con- 
trasted with the ascetic menage of the worshippers. The 
paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright 
marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the mo- 
nastic tribute to sensuous delight — an imperious need, 
for which the Catholic Church has officiously opened 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 307 

the door. One smiles when one thinks how largely an 
ardent imagination, if it makes the most of its opportu- 
nities, may gratify this need under the cover of devo- 
tion. ^N'othing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real 
humility; nothing is too elegant, too suggestive, too 
caressing for the exaltation of faith. The meaner the 
convent cell the richer the convent chapel. Out of 
poverty and solitude, inanition and cold, your honest 
friar may rise at his will into a supreme perception of 
luxury. 

There are various dusky subterranean oratories, 
where a number of bad pictures contend faintly with 
the friendly gloom. Two or three of these funereal 
vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, 
side by side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie 
the white marble effigies of three members of the Accai- 
uoli family, who founded the convent, in the thirteenth 
century. In another, on his back, on the pavement, 
lies a grim old bishop of the same stout race, by the 
same honest craftsman. Terribly grim he is, and scowl- 
ing as if in his stony sleep he still dreamed of his 
hates and his hard ambitions. Last and best, in an- 
other low chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed, 
lies a magnificent image of a later bishop — Leonardo 
Buonafede, who died in 1545, and owes his monument 
to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen little from this 
artist's hand ; but it was evidently a cunning one. His 
model here was a very sturdy old prelate, but, I should 
say, a very genial old man. Tlie sculptor has respected 
his monumental ugliness ; but he has suffused it with 
a singular homely charm — a look of thankful physical 



308 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

comfort in the privilege of paradise. All these figures 
have an inimitable reality, and their lifelike marble 
seejns such an incorruptible incarnation of the genius 
of the place that you begin to imagine it a sort of peril- 
ous audacity in the present government to have begun 
to pull the establishment down, morally speaking, 
about their ears. They are lying quiet yet awhile ; 
but, when the last old friar dies and the convent for- 
mally lapses, won't they rise on their stiff old legs and 
hobble out to the gates and thunder forth anathemas 
before which even a future and more enterprising re- 
gime may be disposed to pause? 

Out of the great central cloister open the snug little 
detached dwellings of the absent fathers. When I said 
just now that the Certosa gives you a glimpse of old 
Italy, I was thinking of this great pillared quadrangle, 
lying half in sun and half in shade, with its tangled 
garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient 
customary well, and the intense blue sky bending 
above it, to say nothing of the indispensable old white- 
robed monk poking about among the lettuce and pars- 
ley. We have seen such places before ; we have visited 
them in that divinatory glance which strays away into 
space for a moment over the top of a suggestive book. 
I don't quite know whether it 's more or less as one's 
fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells 
at all, but very tidy little appartements complets, con- 
sisting of a couple of chambers, a sitting-room, and a 
spacious loggia, projecting out into space from the cliff- 
like wall of the monastery and sweeping from pole to 
pole the loveliest view in the world. It 's poor work, 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 309 

taking notes on views, and I will let this one pass. 
The little chambers are terribly cold and nrnsty now. 
Their odor and atmosphere are such as I used, as a 
child, to imagine those of the school-room during Satur- 
day and Sunday. 

VII. 

In the Eoman streets, wherever you turn, the facade 
of a church, in more or less degenerate flamboyance, 
is the principal feature of the scene ; and if, in the 
absence of purer motives, you are weary with sesthetic 
peregrination over the Eoman cobble-stones, you may 
turn aside at your pleasure and take a reviving sniff at 
the pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon ob- 
serves, the churches are relatively few and the dusky 
house-fronts more rarely interrupted by specimens of 
that extraordinary architecture which in Eome passes 
for sacred. In Florence, in other words, ecclesiasticism 
is not so cheap a commodity and not dispensed in the 
same abundance at the street-corners. Heaven forbid 
I should undervalue the Eoman churches. The deep 
impressions one gathers in them become a substantial 
part of one's culture. It is a fact, nevertheless, that, 
after St. Peter's, I know but one really beautiful church 
in Eome — the enchanting basilica of St. Mary Major. 
Many have fine things, some are very curious, but as a 
rule they all lack the dignity of the great Florentine 
temples. Here, the list being immeasurably shorter 
and the seed less scattered, the great churches are aU 
beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the 



310 TEANS ATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

other day and sat there for half an hour because, for- 
sooth, the gildings and the marbles and the frescoed 
dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with 
its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poig- 
nantly of Eome. Such is the city properly styled 
eternal — since it is eternal, at least, as regards the 
consciousness of the individual. One loves its corrup- 
tions better than the integrities of other places. 

Coming out of the Annunziata, you look past the 
bronze statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I. (whom 
Mr. Browning's heroine used to watch for — in the 
poem of " The Statue and the Bust " — from the red 
palace near by), and down a street vista of enchanting 
picturesqueness. The street is narrow and dusky and 
filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite end rises 
the vast bright-colored side of the Cathedral. It 
stands up in very much the same mountainous fashion 
as the far-shining mass of the Cathedral of Milan, of 
which your first glimpse as you leave your hotel is 
generally through another such dark avenue ; only that, 
if we talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan 
must be likened to snow and ice from their base, while 
those of the Florence Cathedral may be the image of 
some mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. 
Within, this great church has a naked majesty which, 
though it may fail of its effect at first, becomes after a 
while extraordinarily touching. Originally, it puzzled 
me ; now, I have a positive passion for it. Without, it 
is one of the loveliest works of man's hands, and an 
overwhelming proof, in the bargain, that when elegance 
belittles grandeur you have simply had a bungling artist. 



FLORENTINE NOTES. 311 

Santa Croce within is not only the most beautiful 
church in Florence, but one of the most beautiful I 

know. " A trifle naked, if you like," said X ; " but 

that 's what I call architecture." And indeed one is 
far enough away from the clustering odds and ends 
borrowed from every art and every province which 
compose the mere picturesqueness of the finer Eoman 
churches. The vastness, the lightness, the open spring 
of the arches, the beautiful shape of the high, narrow 
choir, the impressiveness without weight and the grav- 
ity without gloom — these are my frequent delight. It 
must be confessed that, between his coarsely imagined 
statue in the square before the church and his horri- 
ble monument inside of it, the author of the Divine 
Comedy is just hereabouts a rather awkward figure. 
"Ungrateful Florence," declaims Byron. Ungrateful, 
indeed ! Would that she were, poor Dante might ex- 
claim, as he prays — as he must in a general way a 
good deal, I should say — to be delivered from his 
friends. 

The interesting church in Florence beyond all others 
is, of course, Santa Maria ]N"ovella, with its great lin- 
ing of masterly frescos. One must be fair, though 
bronchitis does lurk in the dusky chapels beside them. 
Those of Ghirlandaio are beyond all praise ; but what 
I have noted before as to the spirit of his work is only 
confirmed by these examples. In the choir, where the 
incense swings and the great chants resound, between 
the gorgeous colored window and the florid grand altar, 
it is still the world, the world, he relishes and renders 
— the beautiful, full-draped, personal world. 



312 TEANS ATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

VIII. 

The Boboli Gardens are a very charming place. 
Yesterday tiiere was another corso of the same pattern 
as the last, and I wandered away from the crowded 
streets, passed in under the great Augean-looking arch- 
way of the Pitti Palace, and spent the afternoon stroll- 
ing among the mouldy statues against their screens 
of cypress, and looking down at the clustered towers 
of Florence and their background of pale blue hills, 
vaguely freckled with white villas. Nothing in the 
world is so pleasant as a large, quiet garden within the 
precincts of a city. And if the garden is in the Italian 
manner, without flowers or forbidden lawns or paths 
too neatly swept and shrubs too closely trimmed, but 
yet with a certain fanciful formalism giving style to its 
shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and 
here and there a dried-up fountain, and everywhere a 
bit of mildewed sculpture staring at you from a green 
alcove, and there, just in the right place, a grassy am- 
phitheatre, curtained behind with black cypresses and 
sloping downward in mossy marble steps — if, I say, 
the garden possesses these attractions, and you lounge 
there of a soft Sunday afternoon, when a racier spec- 
tacle in the streets has made your fellow-loungers few, 
and you have nothing about you but deep stillness and 
shady vistas, that lead you wonder where, and the old 
quaint mixture of nature and art — under these con- 
ditions the sweetness of the place becomes strangely 
suggestive. The Boboli Gardens are not large. You 
wonder how compact little Florence finds room for 



FLOKENTINE NOTES. 313 

them within her walls. But they are scattered, with 
the happiest natural picturesqueness, over a group of 
steep undulations between the Pitti Palace and the old 
city-wall, and the unevenness of the ground doubles 
their apparent size. What I especially like in them 
is a kind of solemn, dusky, haunted look, as if the 
huge, grave palace which adjoins them had flung over 
them a permanent shadow, charged with its own pon- 
derous niemories and regrets. This is spinning one's 
fancies rather fine, perhaps. Now that I remember, 
I have always chanced to go to the Boboli Gardens 
on gray, melancholy days. And yet they contain no 
bright objects, no parterres, nor pagodas, nor peacocks, 
nor swans. They have a famous amphitheatre, with 
mossy steps and a circular wall of evergreens behind, 
in which little cracked images and vases are niched. 
Something was done here once — or meant to be done. 
What was it, dumb statues, who saw it with your blank 
eyes? Opposite stands the Palace, putting forward 
two great rectangular arms and looking immensely 
solemn, with its closed windows and its huge brown 
blocks of rugged stone. In the space between the 
wings is a fine old white marble fountain, which never 
plays. Its dusty idleness completes the general air of 
abandonment. Chancing upon such a cluster of ob- 
jects in Italy — glancing at them in a certain light, in 
a certain mood — one gets a sense of liistory that takes 
away the breath. Half a dozen generations of Medici 
have stood at these closed windoAvs, embroidered and 
brocaded according to their period, and held/e^fes cham- 
petres and floral games on the greensward, beneath the 

14 



314 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

mouldering hemicycle. And the Medici were great 
people ! But what remains of it all now is a mere 
tone in the air, a vague expression in things, a hint 
to the questioning fancy. Call it much or little, this 
is the interest of old places. Time has devoured the 
doers and their doings ; there hovers over the place a 
perfume of something done. We can build gardens in 
America, adorned with every device of horticulture; 
but we unfortunately cannot scatter abroad this 
strange historic aroma, more exquisite than the rarest 
roses. 



TUSCAN CITIES. 

Florence, April 18, 1S73. 

THE cities I mean are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, and 
Pistoia, among which I have been spending the 
last few days. The most striking fact as to Leghorn, 
it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tus- 
cany, it should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller 
curious in local color must content himself with the 
deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The streets, 
away from the docks, are modern, genteel, and rectan- 
gular ; Liverpool might acknowledge them if it were not 
for their fresh-colored stucco. They are the offspring 
of the new industry which is death to the old idleness. 
Of picturesque architecture, fruit of the old idleness, or 
at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly destitute. 
It has neither a church worth one's attention, nor a mu- 
nicipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim the dis- 
tinction, unique in Italy, of being the city of no pictures. 
In a shabby corner, near the docks, stands a statue of 
one of the elder grand-dukes of Tuscany, appealing to 
posterity on grounds now vague — chiefly that of hav- 
ing placed certain Moors under tribute. Pour colossal 
negroes, in very bad bronze, are chained to the base of 
the monument, which forms with their assistance a suf- 



316 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

ficiently fantastic group ; but to patronize the arts is 
not the line of the Livornese, and, for want of the 
slender annuity which would keep its precinct sacred, 
this curious memorial is buried in dockyard rubbish. 
I must add that, on the other hand, there is a very well- 
conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, extremely 
realistic statue of Cavour in one of the city squares, 
and a couple of togaed effigies of recent grand-dukes in 
another. Leghorn is a city of magnificent spaces, and 
it was so long a journey from the sidewalk to the 
pedestal of these images that I never took the time to 
go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I 
bore the originals a grudge, and wished to know as little 
about them as possible ; for it seemed to me that as 
'patres ^patrice, in their degree, they might have decreed 
that the great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle 
less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, in any 
experience of Italy, and I shall probably in the future 
not be above sparing a light regret to several of the 
hours of which the one I speak of was composed. I 
shall remember a large, cool, bourgeois villa in a garden, 
in a noiseless suburb — a middle-aged villa, roomy and 
stony, as an Italian villa should be. I shall remember 
that, as I sat in the garden, and, looking up from my 
book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery the red 
house-tiles against the deep blue sky and the gray 
underside of the ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediter- 
ranean breeze, I had a vague consciousness that I was 
not in the Western world. 

If you should also wish to have it, you must not 
go to Pisa ; and indeed we are most of us forewarned 



TUSCAN CITIES. 317 

as to Pisa from an early age. Few of ns can have had 
a childhood so unblessed by contact with the arts as 
that one of its occasional diversions should not have 
been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model of the 
Leaning Tower, under a glass cover in a back-parlor. 
Pisa and its monuments have, in other words, been 
industriously vulgarized, but it is astonishing how well 
they have survived the process. The charm of Pisa is, 
in fact, a charm of a high order, and is but partially 
foreshadowed by the famous crookedness of its campa- 
nile. I felt it irresistibly and yet almost inexpressibly 
the other afternoon, as I made my way to the classic 
corner of the city through the w^arm, drowsy air, which 
nervous people come to inhale as a sedative. I was 
with an invalid companion, who had had no sleep to 
speak of for a fortnight. " Ah ! stop the carriage," said 
my friend, gaping, as I could feel, deliciously, " in the 
shadow of this old slumbering palazzo, and let me sit 
here and close my eyes, and taste for an hour of obliv- 
ion." Once strolling over the grass, however, out of 
which the four marble monuments rise, we awaked re- 
sponsively enough to the present hour. Most people 
remember the happy remark of tasteful, old-fashioned 
Forsyth (who touched a hundred other points in his 
" Italy " hardly less happily) as to three beautiful build- 
ings being " fortunate alike in their society and their 
solitude." It must be admitted that they are more for- 
tunate in their society than we felt ourselves to be in 
ours ; for the scene presented the animated appearance 
for which, on any fine spring day, all the choicest haunts 
of ancient quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more 



318 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the 
sculptured portals, and bait for beggars, in abundance, 
trailing in and out of them under convoy of loquacious 
ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the respon- 
sibility of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow- 
tourists and fellow-countrymen became a vague, dead- 
ened, muffled presence, like the dentist's last words 
when he is giving you ether. They suffered a sort 
of mystical disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil 
atmosphere of the place. The cathedral and its com- 
panions are fortunate indeed in everything — fortunate 
in the spacious angle of the gray old city-wall, which 
folds about them in their sculptured elegance like a 
strong protecting arm ; fortunate in the broad green- 
sward which stretches from the marble base of cathedral 
and cemetery to the rugged foot of the rampart ; fortu- 
nate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, plucking 
daisies and exchanging Italian cries ; fortunate in the 
pale-gold tone to which time and the soft sea-damp 
have mellowed and darkened their marble plates ; for- 
tunate, above all, in an indescribable gracefulness of 
grouping (half hazard, half design) which insures them, 
in one's memory of things admired, very much the same 
isolated corner which they occupy in the charming city. 
Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy, I know none that 
I prefer to that of Pisa ; none which, on a moderate 
scale, produces more the impression of a great church. 
Indeed, it seems externally of such moderate size that 
one is surprised at its grandeur of effect within. An 
architect of genius, for all that he works with colossal 
blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the most cun- 



TUSCAN CITIES. 319 

ning of all artists. The facade of the cathedral of Pisa 
is a small pyramidal screen^ covered with delicate carv- 
ings and chasings, distributed over a series of short 
columns upholding narrow arches. It looks like an 
imitation of goldsmith's work in stone, and the space 
covered is apparently so small that there seems a fitness 
in the dainty labor. How it is that on the inner side of 
this facade the wall should appear to rise to a splendid 
height, and to support one end of a ceiling as remote in 
its gilded grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of 
St. Peter's ; how it is that the nave should stretch away 
in such solemn vastness, the shallow transepts carry 
out the grand impression, and the apse of the choir 
hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted with gold- 
en stalactites — all this must be expounded by a keener 
architectural analyst than I. To sit somewhere against 
a pillar, where the vista is large and the incidents clus- 
ter richly, and vaguely revolve these mysteries without 
answering them, is the best of one's usual enjoyment 
of a great church. It takes no great ingenuity to con- 
jecture that a gigantic Byzantine Christ, in mosaic, on 
the concave roof of the choir, contributes largely to the 
impressiveness of the place. It has even more of stiff 
solemnity than is common to works of its school, and it 
made me wonder more than ever what the human mind 
could have been when such unlovely forms could satisfy 
its conception of holiness. There seems something truly 
pathetic in the fate of these huge mosaic idols, and in 
the change that has befallen our manner of accej)tance 
of them. It is a singular contrast between the original 
sublimity of their pretensions and the way in which 



320 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

they flatter that audacious sense of the grotesque which 
the modern imagination has smuggled even into the 
appreciation of religious forms. They were meant to 
be hardly less grand than the Deity itself, but the only 
part they play now is to mark the further end of our 
progress in spiritual refinement. The two limits, on 
this line, are admirably represented in the choir at Pisa, 
by the flat gilded Christ on the roof and the beautiful 
specimen of the painter Sodoma on the wall. The latter, 
a small picture of the Sacrifice of Isaac, is one of the 
best examples of its exquisite author, and perhaps, as 
chance has it, the most perfect opposition that could 
be found to the spirit of the great mosaic. There are 
many painters more powerful than Sodoma — painters 
who, like the author of the mosaic, attempted and com- 
passed grandeur; but none possess a more persuasive 
grace, none more than he have sifted and chastened 
their conception till it exhales the sweetness of a per- 
fectly distilled perfume. 

Of the patient, successive efforts of painting to arrive 
at the supreme refinement of Sodoma, the Campo Santo 
hard by offers a most interesting memorial. It presents 
a long, blank marble wall to the relative profaneness 
of the cathedral close, but within it is a perfect treas- 
ure-house of art. A long quadrangle surrounds an 
open court, where weeds and wild roses are tangled 
together, and a sunny stillness seems to rest consent- 
ingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness of 
the precious relics committed to her. Something in 
the place reminded me of the collegiate cloisters of 
Oxford ; but it must be confessed that this is a hand- 



TUSCAN CITIES. 321 

some compliment to Oxford. The open arches of the 
quadrangles of Magdalen and Christ Church are not 
of mellow Carrara marble, nor do their columns, slim 
and elegant, seem to frame the unglazed windows of a 
cathedral. To be buried in the Campo Santo of Pisa 
you need only be illustrious, and there is liberal allow- 
ance both as to the character and degree of your fame. 
The most obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is 
a most complicated monument to Madame Catalani, the 
singer, recently erected by her possibly too-appreciative 
heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic of sepulchral 
slabs, and the walls, below the base of the paling fres- 
cos, are incrusted with inscriptions and encumbered 
with urns and antique sarcophagi. The place is at once 
a cemetery and a museum, and its especial charm is its 
strange mixture of the active and the passive, of art 
and i-est, of life and death. Originally its walls were 
one vast continuity of closely pressed frescos ; but now 
the great capricious scars and stains have come to out- 
number the pictures, and the cemetery has grown to be 
a burial-place of pulverized masterpieces as well as of 
finished lives. The fragments of painting that remain 
are, however, fortunately, the best ; for one is safe in 
believing that a host of undimmed neighbors would 
distract but little from the two great works of Orcagna. 
Most people know the " Triumph of Death " and the 
" Last Judgment " from descriptions and engravings ; 
but to measure the possible good faith of imitative art, 
one must stand there and see the painter's howling 
potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his 
bright, hard coloring ; see his feudal courtiers on their 

14* U 



322 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

palfreys, holding their noses at what they are so fast 
coming to ; see his great Christ, in judgment, refuse 
forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough to ex- 
tinguish the idea. The charge that Michael Angelo 
borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure 
of Orcagna is more valid than most accusations of pla- 
giarism ; but of the two figures, one at least could be 
spared. For direct, triumphant expressiveness these 
two superb frescos have probably never been surpassed. 
The painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he 
drives certain gross ones home so effectively that for a 
parallel to his skill one must look to the stage. Some 
of his female figures are superb, but they look like 
creatures of a formidable temperament. 

There are charming women, however, on the other 
side of the cloister — in the beautiful frescos of Be- 
nozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna's work was elected to survive 
the ravages of time, it is a happy chance that it should 
be balanced by a group of performances of such a dif- 
ferent temper. The contrast is the more striking that, 
in subject, the work of both painters is narrowly theo- 
logical. But Benozzo cares, in his theology, for nothing 
but the story, the scene, and the drama — the chance 
to pile up palaces and spires in his backgrounds against 
pale blue skies cross-barred with pearly, fleecy clouds, 
and to scatter sculptured arches and shady trellises over 
the front, with every incident of human life going for- 
ward lightly and gracefully beneath them. Lightness 
and grace are the painter's great qualities ; and, if we 
had to characterize him briefly, we might say that he 
marks the hithermost limit of unconscious elegance. 



TUSCAN CITIES. 323 

His charm is natural fineness ; a little more, and we 
should have refinement — which is a very different 
thing. Like all les delicats of this world, as M. Eenan 
calls them, Benozzo has suffered greatly. The space 
on the walls he originally covered with his Old Testa- 
ment stories is immense ; but his exquisite handiwork 
has peeled off by the acre, as one may almost say, and 
the latter compartments of the series are swallowed up 
in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head or 
hand peeps forth, like those of creatures sinking into a 
quicksand. As for Pisa at large, although it is not 
exactly what one would call a mouldering city — for it 
has a certain well-aired cleanness and brightness, even 
in its supreme tranquillity — it affects the imagination 
in very much the same way as the Campo Santo. And, 
in truth, a city so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is 
at every step but the burial-ground of a larger life than 
its present one. The wide, empty streets, the goodly 
Tuscan palaces (which look as if about all of them 
there were a genteel private understanding, independent 
of placards, that they are to be let extremely cheap), 
the delicious relaxing air, the fuU-fiowing yellow river, 
the lounging Pisani, smelling, metaphorically, their pop- 
py-flowers, seemed to me all so many admonitions to 
resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean 
by saying that the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster 
of monuments) is a charm of a high order. The archi- 
tecture is not especially curious ; the lions are few ; 
there are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And 
yet the impression is profound ; the charm is a moral 
charm. If I were ever to be incurably disappointed 



324 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

in life ; if I had lost my health, my money, or my 
friends ; if I were resigned, forevermore, to pitching 
my expectations in a minor key, I think I should go 
and live at Pisa. Something in the atmosphere would 
assent most soothingly to my mind. Its quietude 
would seem something more than a stillness — a hush. 
Pisa may be a dull place to live in, but it is a capital 
place to wait for death. 

Nothing could be more charming than the country 
between Pisa and Lucca — unless possibly it is the 
country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is dead 
Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, 
desiring and intending. The town is a charming mix- 
ture of antique picturesqueness and modern animation ; 
and not only the town, but the country — the bloom- 
ing, romantic country which you behold from the 
famous promenade on the city-wall. The wall is of 
superbly solid brickwork and of extraordinary breadth, 
and its summit, planted with goodly trees, and swell- 
ing here and there into bastions and little open gardens, 
surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place of 
extreme picturesqueness. This well-kept, shady, ivy- 
grown rampart reminded me of certain mossy corners 
of England ; but it looks away to a prospect of more 
than English loveliness — a broad, green plain, where 
the summer yields a double crop of grain, and a circle 
of bright blue mountains speckled with high-hung con- 
vents and profiled castles and nestling villas, and trav- 
ersed by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one 
of the deepest and shadiest of these valleys a charming 
watering-place is hidden away yet awhile longer from 



TUSCAN CITIES. 325 

railways — the baths to which Lucca has given its 
name. Lucca is pre-eminently a city of churches ; ec- 
clesiastical architecture being, indeed, the only one of 
the arts to which it seems to have given attention. 
There are picturesque bits of domestic architecture, but 
no great palaces, and no importunate frequency of pic- 
tures. The cathedral, however, is a resume of the mer- 
its of its companions, and is a singularly noble and 
interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a wonderful 
inlaid front, on Avhich horses and hounds and hunted 
beasts are lavishly figured in black marble over a 
white ground. What I chiefly enjoyed in the gray 
solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb ef- 
fect of certain second-story Gothic arches (those which 
rest on the pavement are Lombard). These arches 
are delicate and slender, like those of the cloister at 
Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper air 
with real sublimity. 

At Pistoia there is, of course, a cathedral, and there 
is nothing unexpected in its being, externally at least, 
a very picturesque one ; in its having a grand campa- 
nile at its door, a gaudy baptistery, in alternate layers 
of black and white marble, across the way, and a stately 
civic palace on either side. But even if I had the 
space to do otherwise, I should prefer to speak less of 
the particular objects of interest at Pistoia than of the 
pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty streets 
the quiet hours of a warm afternoon. To say where I 
lingered longest would be to tell of a little square be- 
fore the hospital, out of which you look up at the beau- 
tiful frieze in colored earthenware by the brothers Delia 



326 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

Robbia, which runs across the front of the building. It 
represents the seven orthodox offices of charity, and* 
with its brilliant blues and yellows, and its tender ex- 
pressiveness, it brightens up amazingly, to the sense 
and soul, this little gray corner of the mediaeval city. 
Pistoia is still strictly mediaeval. How grass-grown it 
seemed, how drowsy, how full of idle vistas and mel- 
ancholy nooks ! If nothing was supremely wonderful, 
everything was delicious. 



RAVENNA. 

Ravenna, June 8, 1874. 

IWEITE these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top, 
shut in by an intense white mist from any glimpse 
of the under-world of lovely Italy; but as I jotted 
down the other day, in the ancient capital of Honorius 
and Theodoric, the few notes of which they are com- 
posed, I let the original date stand for local color's 
sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, emits a grate- 
ful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives 
a depressed imagination something tangible to grasp 
while awaiting the return of fine weather. Eor Ea- 
venna was glowing, less than a week since, as I edged 
along the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of 
the empty, white streets. After a long, chilly spring, 
the summer this year descended upon Italy with a sud- 
den jump and a terrible vehemence of purpose. I stole 
away from Florence in the night, and even on top of 
the Apennines, under the dull starlight and in the 
rushing train, one could but sit and pant perspir- 
ingly. 

At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a 
civil and a religious, going on in mutual mistrust and 
disparagement. The civil one was the now legal Italian 



328 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

holiday of the Statu to ; the religious, a jubilee of cer- 
tain local churches. The latter is observed by the 
Bolognese parishes in couples, and comes round for 
each couple but once in ten years — an arrangement 
by which the faithful at large insure themselves a lib- 
eral recurrence of expensive processions. It was not 
my business to distinguish the sheep from the goats, 
the prayers from the scoffers ; it was enough that, melt- 
ing together under the scorching sun, they made the 
picturesque city doubly picturesque. The combination 
at one point was really dramatic. While a long pro- 
cession of priests and young virgins in white veils, 
bearing tapers, was being organized in one of the streets, 
a review of the King's troops was going on outside of 
the town. On its return, a large detachment of cavalry 
passed across the space where the incense was burning, 
the pictured banners swaying, and the litany being 
droned, and checked the advance of the little ecclesi- 
astical troop. The long vista of the street, between the 
porticos, was festooned with garlands and scarlet and tin- 
sel ; the robes and crosses and canopies of the priests, 
the clouds of perfumed smoke, and the white veils of 
the maidens, were resolved by the hot, bright air into 
a gorgeous medley of color, across which the mounted 
soldiers went rattling and flashing like a conquering 
army trampling over an embassy of propitiation. It 
w^as, to tell the truth, the first time an Italian festa had 
worn to my eyes that warmth of coloring, that pictorial 
confusion, which tradition promises ; and I confess that 
my eyes found more pleasure in it than they found an 
hour later in the picturesque on canvas, as one observes 



EAVENNA. 329 

it in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most 
unmercifully at Guido and Domenicliino. 

For Eavenna, however, I had nothing but smiles — 
grave, philosophic smiles, such as accord with the tran- 
quil, melancholy interest of the place. I arrived there 
in the evening, before, even at drowsy Eavenna, the 
festa of the Statute had altogether put itself to bed. I 
immediately strolled forth from the inn, and found it 
sitting up awhile longer on the piazza, chiefly at the 
caf^ door, listening to the band of the garrison by the 
light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along 
the front of the palace of the Government. Before 
long, however, it had dispersed and departed, and I 
was left alone with the gray illumination and with an 
affable citizen, whose testimony as to the manners and 
customs of Eavenna I had aspired to obtain. I had 
already observed to sufiicient purpose to borrow confi- 
dence to suggest deferentially that it was not the live- 
liest place in the world, and my friend admitted that in 
fact it was a trifle sluggish. But had I seen the Corso ? 
Without seeing the Corso it was unfair to conclude 
against Eavenna. The Corso of Eavenna, of a hot 
summer night, had an air of surprising seclusion and 
repose. Here and there in an upper, closed window 
glimmered a light ; my companion's footsteps and my 
own were the only sounds ; not a creature was within 
sight. The suffocating atmosphere lielped me to be- 
lieve for a moment that I was walking in the Italy of 
Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague, through a 
city which had lost half its population by pestilence 
and the other half by flight. I turned back into my 



330 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

inn, profoundly satisfied. This, at last, was old-world 
dulness of a prime distillation ; this, at last, was antiq- 
uity, history, repose. 

This impression was largely confirmed and enriched 
on the following day ; but it was obliged, at an early 
stage of my explorations, to give precedence to another 
— the lively realization, namely, of my imperfect ac- 
quaintance with Gibbon and other cognate authorities. 
At Eavenna, the waiter at the cafe and the coachman 
who drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to Galla 
Placidia and Justinian, as to any attractive topic of the 
hour ; wherever you turn you encounter some peremp- 
tory challenge to your knowledge of unfamiliar periods. 
For myself, I could only attune my intellect vaguely 
to the intensely historical character of the place — I 
could only feel that I was breathing an atmosphere 
of records and relics. I conned my guide-book and 
looked up at the great mosaics, and then fumbled at 
poor Murray again for some intenser light on the court 
of Justinian ; but I can imagine that to a visitor more 
intimate with the originals of the various great almond- 
eyed mosaic portraits in the vaults of the churches, 
these extremely curious works of art may have a really 
formidable interest. I found Eavenna looking by day- 
light like a vast, straggling, depopulated village. The 
streets with hardly an exception are grass-grown, and 
though I walked about all day I failed to perceive a 
single wheeled vehicle. I remember no shop but the 
little establishment of an urbane photographer, whose 
views of the Pine-Forest gave me an irresistible desire 
to transport myself thither. There was no architecture 



KAVENNA. 331 

to speak of ; and thougli there are a great many large 
domiciles with aristocratic names, they stand cracking 
and baking in the sun in no very comfortable fashion. 
The houses for the most part have a half-rustic look ; 
they are low and meagre and shabby and interspersed 
with high garden walls, over which the long arms of 
tangled vines hang motionless into the stagnant streets. 
Here and there in all this dreariness, in some particu- 
larly silent and grassy corner, rises an old brick church 
with a facade more or less spoiled by cheap moderniza- 
tion, and a strange cylindrical campanile, pierced with 
small arched windows and extremely suggestive of the 
fifth century. These churches constitute the palpable 
interest of Eavenna, and their own principal interest, 
after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned spoliation, 
resides in their unequalled collection of early Christian 
mosaics. It is in a certain sense a curiously simple 
interest, and it leads one's reflections along a narrow 
and definite channel. There are older churches in 
Eome, and churches which, looked at as museums, are 
more variously and richly entertaining; but in Eome 
you stumble at every step upon some curious pagan 
memorial, often beautiful enough to lead your thoughts 
wandering far from the primitive rigidities of the Chris- 
tian faith. 

Eavenna, on the other hand, began with the church, 
and all its monuments and relics are harmoniously 
rigid. By the middle of the first century it possessed 
an exemplary saint — ApoUinaris, a disciple of Peter — 
to whom its two finest churches are dedicated. It was 
to one of these, jocosely entitled the " new " one, that 



332 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

I first directed my steps. I lingered outside awhile 
and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped bell-towers, 
so rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute 
to ring in another century or two, and then went in 
to the coolness, the shining marble columns, the queer 
old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi, and the long 
mosaics, scintillating under the roof, along the wall 
of the nave. San ApoUinare Nuovo, like most of 
its companions, is a magazine of early Christian odds 
and ends ; of fragments of yellow marble incrusted 
with quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma ; 
great rough troughs, containing the bones of old 
bishops ; episcopal chairs with the marble worn nar- 
row with centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal 
person; slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered 
with carven hieroglyphics of an almost Egyptian ab- 
struseness — lambs, and stags, and fishes, and beasts 
of theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all 
these strange things the strange figures in the great 
mosaic panorama look down, with colored cheeks and 
staring eyes, lifelike enough to speak to you and an- 
swer your wonderment, and tell you in bad Latin of 
the decadence that it was in such and such a fashion 
they believed and worshipped. First, on each side, 
near the door, are houses and ships and various old 
landmarks of Eavenna ; then begins a long procession, 
on one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins and 
three obsequious magi, terminating in a throne bearing 
the Madonna and Child, surrounded b}^ four angels ; 
on the other side, of an equal number of male saints 
(twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands 



RAVENNA. 333 

and leading to the Saviour, enthroned between angels 
of singular expressiveness. What it is these long, slim 
seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they have an 
odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals 
of their eyes which, though not without sweetness, 
would certainly make me feel like murmuring a defen- 
sive prayer or so if I were to find myself alone in the 
church toward dusk. All this work is of the latter 
part of the sixth century and brilliantly preserved. 
The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been 
inserted yesterday, and here and there a figure is exe- 
cuted almost too much in the modern manner to be 
interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, to my 
sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. 
The great Christ, in the series of which I speak, is 
quite an elaborate picture, and yet he retains enough 
of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in the 
simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, like 
an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his 
eyebrows arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole 
aspect such a one as the popular mind may have at- 
tributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all very 
Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that interest 
which is inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all 
early representations of the Saviour. Practically, they 
are no more authentic than the more or less plausible 
inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman Hunt; but 
they borrow a certain value, factitious perhaps but irre- 
sistible, from the mere fact tlmt they are twelve or 
thirteen centuries less distant from the original. It is 
something that this is the way people in the sixth 



334 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

century imagined Jesus to have looked ; the image is 
by so much the less complex. The great purple-robed 
monarch on the wall at Eavenna is at least a very 
potent and positive Christ, and the only objection I 
have to make to him is that, though in this character 
he must have had a full apportionment of divine fore- 
knowledge, he betrays no apprehension of Dr. Chan- 
ning and M. Eenan. If one's preference lies, for dis- 
tinctness' sake, between the old narrowness and the 
modern complexity, one must admit that the narrow- 
ness here has a very grand outline. 

I spent the rest of the morning in picturesque tran- 
sition between the hot yellow streets and the cool gray 
interiors of the churches. The grayness everywhere 
was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and entab- 
lature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always 
brilliant and elaborate, and everywhere, too, by the 
same keen wonderment that, while centuries had worn 
themselves away and empires risen and fallen, these 
little cubes of colored glass had stuck in their allotted 
places and kept their freshness. I have no space to 
enumerate the Eavennese churches one by one, and, to 
tell the truth, my memory of them has already become 
a sort of hazy confusion and formless meditation. 
The total aspect of the place, its sepulchral stillness, 
its absorbing perfume of evanescence and decay and 
mortality, confounds the distinctions and blurs the 
details. The Cathedral, which is very vast and high, 
has been excessively modernized, and was being still 
more so by a lavish application of tinsel and cotton- 
velvet in preparation for the centenary feast of St 



EAVENNA. 335 

Apollinaris, which befalls next month. Things on this 
occasion are to be done handsomely, and a fair Eaven- 
nese informed me that a single family had contributed 
three thousand francs towards a month's vesper-music. 
It seemed to me hereupon that I should like in the 
August twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San 
ApoUinare, and look up at the great mosaics through the 
resonance of some fine chanting. I remember distinct- 
ly enough, however, the tall basilica of San Yitale, of 
octagonal shape, like an exchange or custom-house — 
modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople. 
It is very lofty, very solemn, and, as to the choir, 
densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics 
of the time of Justinian. These are regular pictures, 
full of movement, gesture, and perspective, and just 
enough sobered in hue by time to look historic and 
venerable. In the middle of the church, under the 
great dome, sat an artist whom I envied, making at 
an effective angle a picture of the choir and its broken 
licrhts, its decorated altar, and its incrusted, twinklinof 
walls. The picture, when it is finished, will hang, I 
suppose, on the library wall of some person of taste ; 
but even if it is much better than is probable (I did n't 
look at it), all his taste will not tell the owner, unless 
he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, 
out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An 
even better place for an artist fond of dusky architec- 
tural nooks, except that here the dusk is excessive and 
he would hardly be able to tell his green from his red, 
is the extraordinary little church of the Santi ]N"azaro e 
Celso, otherwise known as the mausoleum of Galla 



336 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 



Placidia. This, perhaps, on the whole, is the most im- 
pressive and picturesque spot in Eavenna. It consists 
of a sort of narrow, low-browed cave shaped like a 
Latin cross, every inch of which, except the floor, is 
covered with dense symbolic mosaics. Before you and 
on each side, through the thick, brown light, loom 
three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, containing the 
remains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if 
history had burrowed under ground to escape from 
research, and you had fairly run it to earth. On the 
right lie the ashes of the Emperor Honorius, and in 
the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady 
who, I believe, had great adventures. On the other 
side rest the bones of Constantius III. The place is 
like a little natural grotto lined with glimmering min- 
eral substances, and there is something quite tremen- 
dous in being shut up so closely with these three im- 
perial ghosts. The shadow of the great Eoman name 
seems to brood upon the huge sepulchres and abide 
forever within the narrow walls. 

But there are other memories attached to Eavenna 
beside those of primitive bishops and degenerate em- 
perors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and 
the tomb of the one poet and the dwelling of the other 
are among the regular objects of interest. The grave 
of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, 
and the whole precinct is disposed with that curious 
vulgarity of taste which distinguishes most modern 
Italian tributes to greatness. Dante memorialized in 
stucco, even in a slumbering corner of Eavenna, is not 
a satisfactory spectacle. Fortunately, of all poets he 



RAVENNA. 337 

least needs a monument, as lie was pre-eminently an 
arcliitect in diction, and built himself his memorial in 
verses more solid than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante's 
tomb is not Dantesque, neither is Byron's house By- 
ronic, being a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, 
directly on the street, with as little as possible of isola- 
tion and mystery. In Byron's time it was an inn, and 
it is rather a curious reflection that " Cain " and the 
" Vision of Judgment " should have been written at a 
hotel. Here is a commanding precedent as to self- 
abstraction for tourists who are at once sentimental and 
literary. I must declare, indeed, that my acquaintance 
with Eavenna considerably increased my esteem for 
Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of 
his inspiration. A man so much de son temps as By- 
ron was, can have spent two long years in this pro- 
foundly stagnant city only by the help of taking a 
great deal of disinterested pleasure in his own genius. 
He had indeed a notable pastime (the various churches, 
by the way, are adorned with monuments of ancestral 
Guicciolis ) ; but it is none the less obvious that Ea- 
venna, fifty years ago, would have been an intolerably 
dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unprovided 
with a real intellectual passion. The hour one spends 
with Byron's memory, then, is a charitable one. After 
all, one says to one's self, as one turns away from the 
grandiloquent little slab in the front of his house and 
looks down the deadly provincial vista of tlie empty, 
sunny street, the author of so many superb stanzas 
asked less from the world than he gave to it. One of 
his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, begin- 

15 V 



338 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 



^ 



ning a couple of miles from the city, extends for some 
twenty-live miles along the sands of the Adriatic. I 
drove out^to it for Byron's sake, and Dante's, and Boc- 
caccio's, all of M^hom have interwoven it with their fic- 
tions, and for that of a possible whiff of coolness from 
the sea. Between the city and the forest, in the midst 
of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of the Eav- 
ennese churches, the stately temple of San ApoUinare 
in Classe. The Emperor Augustus constructed here- 
abouts a harbor for fleets, which the ages have choked 
up, and which survives only in the title of this ancient 
church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly im- 
pressive. They opened the great doors for me, and let 
a shaft of heated air go wander up the beautiful nave, 
between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns of 
cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the 
choir, and spend itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. 
I passed a delicious half-hour sitting in this wave of 
tempered light, looking down the cool, gray avenue of 
the nave, out of the open door at the vivid green 
swamps, listening to the melancholy stillness. I ram- 
bled for an hour in the Pineta, between the tall, smooth, 
silvery stems of the pines, beside a creek which led me 
to the outer edge of the wood and a view of white sails, 
gleaming and gliding behind the sand-hills. It was 
infinitely picturesque ; but, as the trees stand at wide 
intervals, and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little 
parasol of foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer 
day, the forest was only the more Italian for being per- 
fectly shadeless. 



THE SPLUGEN. 



I. 



I AM puzzled to say just when and where my jour- 
ney began ; but I think I may date it from my 
discovery that the heat was penetrating into the inte- 
rior of Milan Cathedral. Then the case seemed serious. 
The Italian summer was maturing, with inexorable con- 
sistency. Florence had become intolerable; the ar- 
cades of Bologna were a defence against the sun, but 
not against the deadly heaviness of the air; Eavenna 
was plunged in its summer siesta — the sultry sleep 
from which it never wakes ; and Milan lay basking on 
the Lombard plain, distributing reflected heat from 
every glittering pinnacle of its famous church. It 
seemed, for a conscientious traveller, the lowest depth 
of demoralization to sit all day in an American rocking- 
chair in the court of a hotel, watching the comings and 
goings of English families, under the conduct of those 
English papas who, in sunny climes, as a tribute to an 
unwonted and possibly perilous sensation, wear their 
hats sheeted with white draperies so voluminous that 
they look as if they had chosen this method of carrying 
the family linen to the wash. But it was too hot to 
wander and explore ; too many scorching pavements 



340 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 



y 



intervened between the Corso and the Brera. So I 
adjourned daily for a couple of hours to the cathedral, 
and founf) what I supposed to be an immitigable cool- 
ness in its gorgeous, dusky vastness. The Church has 
always been, spiritually, a refuge from the world, and 
its virtue in this respect was here magnificently sym- 
bolized. The world without was glaring, suffocating, 
insupportable ; the cathedral within was all shadow 
and comfort and delight. It was, I suppose, because it 
was so comfortable to sit there uncovered in the cool 
air and breathe at one's ease that I was shortly won to 
the opinion that Milan Cathedral is, after all, a very 
noble piece of Gothic architecture. N'oble within I had 
never exactly found it, and had indulged the innocent 
paradox of saying that there were a dozen scantier 
churches that had more real grandeur. But now it 
seemed to me to have grandeur enough, in all con- 
science, and I found an endless interest in its rich pic- 
turesqueness. It is not, like St. Peter's, and even more 
like the beautiful cathedral of Florence, what one may 
call an intellectual church ; it does little toward lead- 
ing one's musings away into the realm of ideas ; but 
its splendid solidity of form, its mysterious accumula- 
tions of shadow, the purple radiance of its painted win- 
dows, and the dark magnificence of the whole precinct 
of the high altar and choir, make it peculiarly gratify- 
ing to the sensuous side of one's imagination. I wms 
struck more than ever with the extraordinary breadth 
of the church from transept to transept. That of St. 
Peter's may be as great, but the immense colored win- 
dows of Milan seem to lengthen the reach of these 



THE SPLUGEN. 341 

great wings. Sitting at the base of one of the stupen- 
dous columns — as massive as they need be to sustain 
the great city of statues, as one may call it, on the roof 
— you may look for hours at a great spectacle, a spec- 
tacle which in truth reminds you very much of a huge 
piece of scenic mechanism. There are so many odds 
and ends of adornment tacked about on the pillars and 
dangling from the roof, so many ropes and wires play- 
ing their parts in the complex machinery and swinging 
from vaults and arches, so many pendent lamps and 
tinselled draperies catching the light here and there as 
they traverse the dusky upper air, that you may almost 
fancy that you are behind the curtain on the stage, be- 
fore the various loose ends of the scenic architecture 
have been shufiled out of sight. I do not exactly know 
how to speak of an immense gilded crucifix which from 
time immemorial has hung high above the great altar, 
at a short distance beneath the roof. The melancholy 
fashion in which it caught the afternoon light made it 
glitter picturesquely against the deepening shadows of 
the choir, and yet seemed to bring out with tragic 
force its moral significance. The crucifix in Catholic 
churches is repeated with what seems to me trivial fre- 
quency. It would be better, surely, in the interest of 
reverence, to present it sparingly and only on the most 
impressive occasions. But something in the position 
of this great high-hung cross of Milan makes it pecul- 
iarly commanding, and helps it to say effectually that, 
in spite of the color and splendor, the perfumes and 
draperies, the place is dedicated to a religion founded 
in poverty and obscurity. I found a good deal of in^ 



342 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

terest of another sort in looking at the extremely hand- 
some Milanese women who come to the Cathedral to 
their devotions. If the place has a theatrical air, they 
certainly might serve as the characters of a romantic 
comedy. When I call them extremely handsome I 
may possibly let some of them off on easy terms, for 
they wear on their heads those black lace Spanish 
mantillas which, if they make a beautiful woman irre- 
sistibly charming, supply even the plainest with a very 
fair imitation of good looks. But, indeed, as a rule, the 
ladies of Milan are extraordinarily fair, especially to an 
eye accustomed to the stunted stature and meagre con- 
tours of the Tuscans ; and, after much respectful obser- 
vation of them in the streets, the churches, and that long 
glass gallery (the Palais Eoyal of Milan), which offers 
to an attentive spectator a resume of the local physiog- 
nomy, I found myself ready to declare that of all the 
feminine types I had had the felicity to contemplate, 
this one is, as the Italians say, the most sympathetic. 
It would take too long to tell in what the sympathy 
consists, and in these matters a word to the wise is 
sufficient. The most grateful memory one can carry 
away from a country one is fond of is an agreeable im- 
pression of its women, and I am free to confess that 
these lovely Lombards gave an edge to my relish for 
Italy of which in other places I had been at best but 
fitfully conscious. South of the Apennines, and espe- 
cially at Eome and N'aples, one enters the circle of 
Oriental tradition as regards female deportment. Zu- 
leikas and Gulnares are very captivating in Byron and 
Moore ; but in real life even those modified imitations 



THE SPLiJGEN. 343 

of them which hang in dishabille over Eoman balconies 
or sit in toilets hardly less "advantageous," as the 
French say, in Florentine barouches, have a regrettable 
absence of what is called style. The lovely penitents 
of Milan, with their dusky veils and their long fans, 
who came rustling so far over the vast cathedral pave- 
ment to say their prayers, had style in abundance, and 
a style altogether their own. 

My impressions at the first stage of my journey, at 
which they passed beyond a mood of fervid meditation 
on the temperature, were of sterner things than pictu- 
resque devotes and painted windows. I lay on a grassy 
hillside, five thousand feet in the air, inhaling the Alpine 
atmosphere and gazing away at "the Alpine view. There 
can be no better place for this delicious pastime than 
that beautiful series of turf-covered ridges which rise 
out of the chestnut woods of the Lake of Lugano and 
bear the charming name of Monte Generoso. Here, on 
a grassy plateau, within an hour's walk of the highest 
of these carpeted pinnacles, stands an excellent moun- 
tain inn, looking down over the dim blue plain of Lom- 
bardy and just catching on the hazy horizon the flash 
of the marble walls of Milan Cathedral. The place is 
called the Italian Eighi, which is an indifferent compli- 
ment, unless one particularly emphasizes the adjective. 
It is lovelier far, to my sense, than its Swiss rival ; and 
when I just now spoke of its sternness I simply meant 
that everything is relative, and that an Alp, even with 
an Italian exposure, has a different sort of charm from 
a pretty woman. But Alpine grandeur, as you look at 
it from Monte Generoso, is suffused with a wonderful 



344 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

softness and sweetness, and the Italian atmosphere 
tones down the view, as it takes the edge from any 
importunate freshness in the breeze. Views and breezes 
at Monte Generoso are the sum of one's entertainment, 
and all are admirable in their kind. You behold almost 
every mountain of notable importance in Switzerland 
(exclusive of the Mont Blanc range), and see it melting 
away in such enchanting confusions of aerial blue that 
you take it at first for some fantastic formation of mist 
and cloud. Betimes in the morning, before the clouds 
gather, Monte Eosa is queen of the prospect — rising 
white and serene above her blue zone of warm haze, 
like some Venus of divine stature emerging from the 
sunny sea. Monte Generoso is an ideal place for taking 
a holiday that has been well earned, and that finds you 
tired and languid enough to appreciate an unlimited 
opportunity to lie on shady slopes and listen to cow- 
bells and watch the bees thumping into the cups of 
flowers, which look tall as you see them against the sky. 
Shade is scarce, as on all mountain-tops ; but there are 
grassy hollows and screens of rock, and the shadows 
grow with the afternoon, and, as you lounge there, too 
contented to rise, creep across the nestling valleys, in 
which white villages have been glittering, and cover the 
long slopes. Even in the sun you may be fairly com- 
fortable, with the assistance of your umbrella and of 
the agreeable lightness of the air. I noted this during 
an afternoon which I spent lying at my length, with a 
book, on the grassy apex of the mountain. It is rather 
a dizzy perch. You must mind your steps, and if you 
are subject to the baleful fascination of precipices you 



THE SPLUGEN. 345 

will lie down for your nerves' sake. Everything aronnd 
me was so vast and silent and sublime that it took all 
meaning from the clever prose with which I had pro- 
vided myself; so that I closed the volume and gave 
myself up to the perusal of the fine wrinkles on the 
azure brow of the Lake of Lugano, ever so far beneath 
me. It is hard to break the spell of silence and sub- 
limity on such a spot by picking yourself up and jolting 
back to the hotel. You have been lifted deliciously 
out of the world, and the hotel seems the first stage 
of a melancholy return to it. This, indeed, is the mood 
that soon begins to govern your general attitude at 
Monte Generoso, among the breezes, the wild-flowers, 
and the cattle-bells. At first you feel exiled and cabined 
and confined. You are in ill-humor with the dimen- 
sions of your room, with the bad smells on the staircase, 
with the infrequency of the post and the frequency of 
the Church of England service in the parlor, where you 
have left the second volume of your Tauchnitz novel. 
But at the end of two or three days you find a charm 
in the very simplification of your life, and wish devoutly 
that the post came but half as often. You desire to 
know as little as possible about the horrible things that 
are taking place in the world, four thousand feet below 
you, and to steep yourself indefinitely in your bath of 
idleness and sunny coolness and piny smells. If you 
come away, as I did, after a short stay, it will probably 
be in self-defence. If you have work to do, it is, of 
course, bad policy to lapse into languid scepticism as 
to the existence of the powers to whom you are ac- 
countable for it. 

15* 



346 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

II. 

Once the cliarm broken, it seemed simpler and more 
sternly practical to leave Italy altogether, and to this 
end I found myself sailing in profound regretfulness 
along the Lake of Como. It was not for the first time, 
and I don't know that I made any very novel observa- 
tions. The hotel at Cadennabbia looked more than ever 
like an artful palace at the back of the stage at the 
opera, and the boatmen and porters, in their crimson 
sashes, like robust choristers before the foot-lights. 
Bellagio, opposite, propounded with its usual force the 
query as to why a tourist in the full possession of his 
reason should remain there an hour, when it costs him 
but a franc or two to be rowed across to Cadennabbia. 
Apparently the race of irrational tourists is large ; for the 
pretty villas at Bellagio are, one and all, being turned 
into inns. The afternoon waned and the violet lights 
on the mountains slowly cooled down into grays ; the 
passengers, group by group, descended into the pictu- 
resque old hooded scows which row out from the vil- 
lages to meet the little steamer; the evening came on, 
warm as the day ; and at last I disembarked at Colico 
and waited for the lading of the Splugen diligence. 
Colico is a very raw little village, and I could have 
fancied myself for half an hour in some lakeside settle- 
ment of our Western world. I sat on a pile of logs by 
the roadside, opposite to a tavern with an unattractive 
bar, amid a circle of contemplative village loafers. The 
road was deep in dust, there was no gendarme within 
sight, and every one seemed about equally commissioned 



THE SPLUGEN. 347 

to " heave " the trunks and put in the horses. It was 
a good human, genial last impression of ancient Italy. 

I shall not undertake to describe the journey across 
the Splligen Pass, as I enjoyed it in the banquette of 
the coach. With this portion of my route I was also 
already acquainted — intimately and in detail, as a 
pedestrian learns to be. My attention, indeed, during 
no small part of the time, was absorbed in wonderment 
at my ever having found it sport to do so laboriously 
what I was now doing so luxuriously. For my position 
ceased to be luxurious only when the fantastic crags 
above the close, dusky valleys had enticed the innocent 
young moon to peep below their sinister battlements 
and we began to climb, with a long, steady pull, into 
keener air. Then it became uncomfortably cold, and 
the temperature was not more tolerable that I sat self- 
convicted of a want of imagination for having declined, 
at fervid Colico, to equip myself with various incongru- 
ous draperies. But in the middle of June the nights 
are short, and while still in the very small hours and 
well below the top of the Pass I was treated to the 
spectacle of an Alpine morning twilight. It was pro- 
digiously fine ; but the poor coffee at the village of 
Spliigen seemed to me finer still, in virtue of being 
tolerably hot. By the time we entered the Via Mala, 
however, the sun had climbed high, and I was able to 
do easy justice to the grandeur of things. They are 
certainly very grand indeed in the Via Mala, and there 
could not be a finer specimen of the regular "romantic 
scenery " of song and story. The crags tower above 
your head and the gorge plunges beneath your feet 



348 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

as wildly and strangely as if the genius of Dore had 
given them the finishing strokes. At moments you 
have the perfect extravagance of the sublime ; the top 
of the ravine becomes a rugged vault, streaked crookedly 
with a little thread of blue, and the bottom a kind of 
longitudinal caldron, in which, through a deep, black 
fissure, you discover a terrific boiling of waters. All 
tliis grandeur gathers itself up at last on each side of a 
mighty portal of forest-crowned cliffs and forms a frame 
for the picture of a long green valley, at the entrance 
of which lies charming Thusis, upon soft slopes, among 
orchards and cornfields. You rattle out into the hard 
light, the cold coloring, the angular mountain forms of 
veritable Switzerland. 

The terminus of the Spliigen road is the curious 
little town of Chur, the ancient capital of the Grisons, 
which is perhaps known to the general English reader 
chiefly as the place in which Thackeray found the text 
of the first of his Eoundabout Papers — " On a Lazy, 
Idle Boy." This young desmwvre was hanging over the 
railing of the bridge, reading a tattered volume, which 
Thackeray fondly conceives to be the " Three Musket- 
eers " — starting from this facile postulate to deliver a 
charming puff of the novelist's trade. I did not see 
the boy ; but I saw the bridge and the admirable little 
mountain river which it spans, and which washes the 
base of the excellent Steinbock inn and forms a mag- 
nificent moat to the ancient circumference of the city. 
At the end of the bridge is an old tower and archway, 
under which you pass into a labyrinth of clean little 
quiet streets, lined with houses whose doorways are 



THE SPLUGEN. 349 

capped with an armorial shield with an ancient date, and 
darkened by the overhanging tops of the gloomy pine- 
clad hills. These lead yon to another gray tower and an- 
other straddling tunnel, through which you emerge into 
the Hof — the old ecclesiastical precinct of Chur. Here, 
on a little scrubbed and soundless square, flanked on 
one side by an old yellow episcopal palace, adorned with 
those rococo mouldings in white stucco which flourished 
late in the seventeenth century, rises one of the most 
venerable churches in Europe. The cathedral of Chur, 
however, has nothing in its favor but its thirteen cen- 
turies of duration and its little museum in the sacristy 
of queer ecclesiastical bric-a-brac. It is neither spacious 
nor elegant in an architectural way, and there is some- 
thing almost pitiful in its awkward attempts at internal 
bedizenment. You seem to see an old woman of ninety 
pomaded and painted and overladen with false jewelry. 
The adornments at Chur are both very florid and very 
frugal ; and, if there is pity in the matter, it should be 
for the story they tell of the immemorial impecuniosity 
of the toiling and trudging Swiss people. The old 
prince-bishops of Chur were persons of much conse- 
quence, and the province of the Grisons one of the 
largest and most powerful in Switzerland ; but the ca- 
thedral chapter evidently never had the funds for doing 
things handsomely. Late in the sixteenth century, in- 
deed, it treated itself to a goodly work of art in the 
shape of a large altar-piece in carved wood, painted 
and gilded with extraordinary verisimilitude, represent- 
ing the Nativity and the Magi ; but the church has 
the air of never having fairly recovered from the effect 



350 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

of this sumptuous purchase. It yields, however, a sub- 
stantial interest in the way of glory ; for, although the 
work belongs to a rather charmless department of art, 
it has remarkable merit. The figures are almost un- 
comfortably lifelike, and one of the kings, with a know- 
ing black eye and a singularly clever short beard, is, 
I am sure, quite capable of speaking (and saying some- 
thing very disagreeable) to a person of a fanciful turn 
of mind who should happen to be alone in the church 
at twilight. I suppose the church has a fund of poten- 
tial wealth in its rich collection of archaic brasses and 
parchments. Here is a multitude of strange crosses 
and croziers and candlesticks and reliquaries, dating 
from the infancy of Christian art, and which seem 
somehow more intensely old and more penetrated with 
the melancholy of history for having played their part 
for so many centuries amid the remoteness and still- 
ness of the steep pine forests which hang across the 
windows as a dark outer curtain. The great treasure 
is a series of documents of the early Carlovingian kings 
— grants of dominion to old bishops strong enough to 
ask and get ; and the gem of this collection is a crum- 
pled shred of parchment, covered with characters slowly 
and painfully formed, yet shapely and stately in their 
general aspect, which is neither more nor less than a 
portion of a deed of Charlemagne himself He is such 
a shadowy and legendary monarch that this venerable 
tattler reminded me of the stories told by " spiritual- 
ists," in which the apparition, on retiring, deposits on 
the table a flower or a ribbon, a photograph or a visit- 
ing-card. 



THE SPLUGEN. 351 

The last of the picturesque memories of my journey 
is that of a morning spent at Basel among the works 
of the great Hans Holbein. With the exception of a 
glance at the spacious red sandstone cathedral (cold, 
naked, and Lutheran within), and another at the broad 
yellow Ehine which sweeps beneath the windows of 
the hotel, this in the only aesthetic diversion to be 
found at Basel, the most prosaic and prosperous of all 
the Swiss cities. It is probably tlie only place in Swit- 
zerland w^hich is wholly without pretensions to " scen- 
ery " ; but no other place, on the other hand, has an art- 
treasure of the value of the collection of Holbeins. The 
great portraitist lived for many years at Basel, and the 
city fell heir in one way and another to a number of 
his drawings and to several of his pictures. I found it 
a different sort of art from any that has ever flourished 
in the lovely land I had left, but a very admirable art 
in its own way — firm, compact, and comfortable, sure 
alike of its end and of its means. The Museum of 
Basel contains many other specimens of the early Ger- 
man school, and to an observer freshly arrived from 
Italy they have a puzzling and an almost painful inter- 
est. Every artist of talent has somewhere lurking in 
his soul, I suppose, a guiding conception, an ideal of 
formal beauty, and even Martin Schongauer must have 
dimly discriminated in his scheme of things portray- 
able between a greater and a less degree of hideousness. 
This ruthless caricaturist of humanity, it is to be pre- 
sumed, has bequeathed to us his most favorable view 
of things, and he leaves us wondering from what mon- 
strous human types he can have drawn his inspiration. 



352 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

The heart grows heavy as one reflects what art might 
have come to if it had developed exclusively in north- 
ern hands. The Italian painters of the great schools 
certainly often enough fall short of beauty — miss it, 
overlook it, wander erringly to one side of it : but its 
name, at least, is always on their lips and its image 
always at their hearts. The early Germans do not 
seem to have suspected that such a thing existed, and 
the painter's mission, in their eyes, is simply to appro- 
priate, ready-made, the infinite variations of grotesque- 
ness which they regard as the necessary environment 
of the human lot. Even Holbein, superb genius as he 
was, is never directly and essentially beautiful. Beauty, 
to his sense, is verity, dignity, opulence, goodliness of 
costume and circumstance ; and the thoroughly hand- 
some look of many of his figures resides simply in the 
picturesque assemblage of these qualities. Admirably 
handsome some of them are ; not the least so the fas- 
cinating little drawings in pen and ink and sepia, famil- 
iar now half the world over by Messrs. Braun's photo- 
graphs. Holbein had, at least, an ideal of beauty of 
execution, of manipulation, of touch. Anything firmer, 
finer, more suggestive of the fascination of what is 
vulgarly called " niggling " with brush and pencil it 
would be difficult to conceive. The finest example of 
this among the drawings is the artist's delightful por- 
trait of himself. He ought to have believed in hand- 
some forms, for he was himself a very handsome fellow. 
Among the paintings all the portraits are admirable, 
and two have an extraordinary interest. One is the 
famous profile of Erasmus, with his eyes dropped on a 



THE SPLUGEN. 353 

book, and that long, thin, delicate nose, which curves 
largely over the volume, as if it also were a kind 
of sympathetic absorbent of science. The other is a 
portrait of a mysterious young man, in a voluminous 
black cap, pulled forward over his brow, a searching 
dark eye, and a nose at once prominent and delicate, 
like that of Erasmus. Beside him is a tablet with a 
Latin inscription, and behind him a deep blue sky. The 
sky is crossed diagonally by the twig of a tree and 
bordered by a range of snow mountains. The painting 
is superb, and I call the subject mysterious because he 
was evidently no ordinary fellow, and the artist tells us 
of him but half that we would like to know. It was 
an untimely moment, I may say, in conclusion, for 
quarrelling with the German genius, for on turning my 
back upon Martin Schongauer, I went rattling across 
the Ehine. 



HOMBURG REFORMED. 

Homburg, July 28, 1873. 

I HAVE been finding Homburg a very pleasant place, 
but I have been half ashamed to confess it. Peo- 
ple assure me on all sides that its glory is sadly dimmed, 
and that it can be rightly enjoyed only to the music of 
roulette and of clinking napoleons. It is known by 
this time, I suppose, even in those virtuously disinter- 
ested communities where these lines may circulate, that 
the day of roulette in these regions is over, and that in 
the matter of rouge-et-noir United Germany has taken 
a new departure. The last unhallowed gains at the 
green tables w^ere pocketed last summer, and the last 
hard losses, doubtless, as imperturbably endured as if 
good-natured chance had still a career to run. Chance, 
I believe, at Homburg was not amazingly good-natured, 
and kept her choicest favors for the bank ; but now 
that the reign of Virtue has begun, I have no doubt 
there are plenty of irregular characters who think that 
she was much the more amiable creature of the two. 
What provision has been made for this adventurous 
multitude I am at loss to conceive, and how life 
strikes people now for whom, at any time these twenty 
years, it has been concentrated in the shifting victory 



HOMBUEG EEFORMED. 355 

of red or black. Some of them have taken to better 
courses, I suppose ; some of them, doubtless, to worse ; 
but I have a notion that many of them have begun to 
wear away the dull remainder of existence in a kind 
of melancholy, ghostly hovering around the deserted 
Kursaals. I have seen many of these blighted surviv- 
ors sitting about under the trees in the Kurgarten, with 
the old habit of imperturbability still in their blank, 
fixed faces — neat, elderly gentlemen, elderly ladies 
not especially venerable, whose natural attitude seems 
to be to sit with their elbows on the table and their 
eyes on the game. They have all, of course, a pack of 
cards in their pockets, and their only consolation must 
be to play " patience " forevermore. When I remem- 
ber, indeed, that I am in legendary Germany, I find it 
easy to believe that in these mild summer nights, when 
the stupid people who get up at six o'clock to drink the 
waters are safely in bed, they assemble in some far- 
away corner of the park, and make a green table of 
the moonlit grass. Twice a week the old gaming-rooms 
at the Kursaal are thrown open, the chandeliers are 
lighted, and people go and stare at the painting and 
gilding. There is an immense deal of it, all in the 
elaborate rococo style in which French decorators of 
late years have become so proficient, and which makes 
an apartment look half like a throne-room and half like 
a cafe ; but when you have w^alked about and looked 
at the undressed nymphs on the ceilings and the list- 
less crowd in the great mirrors, you have nothing to 
do but to walk out again. The clever sumptuosity of 
the rooms makes virtue look rather foolish and dingy. 



356 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

and classes the famous M. Blanc, in the regard of pleas- 
nre-loving people, with the late Emperor of the French 
and other potentates more sinned against than sinning 
— martyred benefactors to that large portion of the 
human race who would fain consider the whole world as 
a watering-place. It is certainly hard to see what thrifty 
use the old gaming-rooms can be put to ; they must 
stand there always in their gorgeous emptiness, like 
the painted tomb-chambers of Eastern monarchs. 

There was certainly fair entertainment in watching 
the play — and in playing, according to circumstances ; 
but even in the old days I think I should have got my 
chief pleasure at the Kursaal in a spectacle which has 
survived the fall of M. Blanc. As you pass in the 
front door, you look straight across the breadth of the 
building through another great door which opens on 
the gardens. The Kursaal stands on an elevation, and 
the ground plunges away behind it with a great stretch, 
which spreads itself in a charming park. Beyond the 
park it rises again into the gentle slopes of the Taunus 
mountains, and makes a high wooded horizon. This 
picture of the green hollow and the blue ridge greets 
you as you come in, framed by the opposite doorway, 
and I have sometimes wondered whether in the gaming 
days an occasional novice with a tender conscience, on 
his way to the tables, may not have seemed to see in it 
the pleading face of that mild economist. Mother Na- 
ture herself. It is, doubtless, thinking too fancifully 
of human nature to believe that a youth with a napo- 
leon to stake, and the consciousness of no more rigid 
maternal presence than this, should especially heed the 



HOMBURG REFOEMED. 357 

suggestion that it would be better far to take a walk in 
the woods. The truth is, I imagine, that nature has no 
absolute voice, and that she speaks to us very much 
according to our moods. The view from the terrace at 
the Kursaal has often had confusion pronounced upon 
it by players with empty pockets, and has been senti- 
mentally enjoyed by players with a run of luck. We 
have the advantage now, at least, of finding it always 
the same, and always extremely pretty. Homburg, in- 
deed, is altogether a very pretty place, and its prettiness 
is of that pleasing sort which steals gradually on the 
attention. It is one of nature's own watering-places, 
and has no need, like so many of the audacious sister- 
hood, to bully you by force of fashion into thinking it 
tolerable. 

Your half-hour's run from Frankfort across a great 
sunny expanse of cornfields and crab-apple trees is 
indeed not particularly charming ; but the sight of the 
town as you approach it, with its deep-red roofs rising 
out of thick shade at the base of its blue hills, is a 
pledge of salubrious repose. Homburg stands on a 
gentle spur of the highest of these hills, and one of its 
prettiest features is your seeing the line of level plain 
across the foot of its long sloping main street and the 
line of wooded mountain across the top. The main 
street, which is almost all of Homburg proper, has the 
look of busy idleness which belongs to watering-places. 
There are people strolling along and looking into the 
shop-windows who seem to be on the point of buying 
something for the sake of something to do. The shops 
deal chiefly in the lighter luxuries, and the young ladies 



358 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

who wait in them wear a great many ribbons and a 
great deal of hair. All the houses take lodgers, and 
every second one is a hotel, and every now and then 
you hear them chanting defiance at each other to the 
sound of the dinner-bell. In the middle of the street 
is the long red stuccoed facade of the Kursaal — the 
beating heart of the Homburg world, as one might have 
called it formerly. Its heart beats much slower now, 
but whatever social entertainment you may still find at 
Homburg you must look for there. People assemble 
there in very goodly crowds, if only to talk about the 
dreadful dulness, and to commiserate each other for not 
having been here before. The place is kept up by a 
tax, promptly levied on all arriving strangers, and it 
seems to be prosperously enough maintained. It gives 
you a reading-room where you may go and practise 
indifference as you see a sturdy Briton settling down 
heavily over your coveted "Times," just as you might of 
old when you saw the croupier raking in your stakes ; 
music by a very fair band twice a day ; a theatre, a 
cafe, a restaurant and a table-d'hote, and a garden illu- 
minated every three or four evenings in the Vauxhall 
manner. People differ very much as to the satisfaction 
they take in sitting about under flaring gas-lamps and 
watching other people march up and down and pass 
and repass them by the hour. The pastime, pushed to 
extremes, tends, to my own thinking, to breed misan- 
thropy — or an extra relish at least for a good book 
in one's own room and the path through the woods 
where one is least likely to meet any one. But if 
you use the Kursaal sparingly, and reserve it for an 



HOMBURG REFOEMED. 359 

hour or two in the evening, it is certainly amusing 
enough. 

I should be very sorry to underestimate the enter- 
tainment to be found in observing the comings and 
goings of a multifarious European crowd, or the number 
of suggestions and conclusions which, with a desultory 
logic of its own, the process contributes to one's philoso- 
phy of life. Every one who prefers to sit in a chair 
and look rather than walk up and down and be looked 
at, may be assumed to possess this intellectual treasure. 
The observations of the "cultivated American" bear 
chiefly, I think, upon the great topic of national idio- 
syncrasies. He is apt to have a keener sense of them 
than Europeans ; it matters more to his imagination 
that his neighbor is English, French, or German. He 
often seems to me to be a creature wandering aloof, but 
half naturalized himself. His neighbors are outlined, 
defined, imprisoned, if you will, by their respective 
national moulds, pleasing or otherwise ; but his own 
type has not hardened yet into the old-world bronze. 
Superficially, no people carry more signs and tokens of 
what they are than Americans. I recognize them, as 
they advance, by the whole length of the promenade. 
The signs, however, are all of the negative kind, and 
seem to assure you, first of all, that the individual be- 
longs to a country in which the social atmosphere, like 
the material, is extremely thin. American women, for 
the most part, in compliance with an instinct certainly 
not ungraceful, fill out the ideal mould with wonderful 
Paris dresses; but their dresses do little toward com- 
pleting them, characterizing them, shelving and labelling 



360 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

them socially. The usual English lady, marching heav- 
ily about under the weight of her ingenious bad taste, 
has indescribably more the air of v/hat one may call a 
social factor — the air of social responsibility, of having 
a part to play and a battle to fight. Sometimes, when 
the battle has been hard, the lady's face is very grim 
and unlovely, and I prefer the listless, rustling person- 
ality of my countrywomen ; at others, when the cause 
has been graceful and the victory easy, she has a robust 
amenity which is one of the most agreeable things in 
the world. But these are metaphysical depths, though 
in strictness they ought not to be out of the way as one 
sits among German pipes and beer. The smokers and 
drinkers are the solid element at the Kursaal — the dom- 
inant tone is the German tone. It comes home very 
forcibly to the sense of our observant American, and it 
pervades, naturally enough, all his impressions of Hom- 
burg. People have come to feel strongly within the last 
four years that they must take the German tone into 
account, and they will find nothing here to lighten the 
task. If you have not been used to it, if you don't 
particularly relish it, you doubtless deserve some sym- 
pathy ; but I advise you not to shirk it, to face it frankly 
as a superior critic should, and to call if necessary for a 
pipe and beer also, and build yourself into good-humor 
with it. It is very agreeable, in an unfamiliar country, 
to collect travellers' evidence on local mamiers and 
national character. You are sure to have some vague 
impressions to be confirmed, some ingenious theory to 
be illustrated, some favorite prejudice in any case to be 
revised and improved. Even if your opportunities for 



HOMBUEG EEFORMED. 361 

observation are of the commonest kind, you find them 
serving your purpose. The smallest things become 
significant and eloquent and demand a place in your 
note-book. I have learned no especial German secrets, 
I have penetrated into the bosom of no German families ; 
but somehow T have received — I constantly receive — 
a weighty impression of Germany. It keeps me com- 
pany as I walk in the woods and fields, and sits beside 
me — not precisely as a black care, but with an influ- 
ence, as it were, which reminds one of the after-taste of 
those articles of diet which you eat because they are 
good for you and not because you like them — when at 
last, of an evening, I have found the end of a bench on 
the promenade behind the Kursaal. One's impression 
of Germany may or may not be agreeable, but there is 
very little doubt that it is what one may call highly 
nutritive. In detail, it would take long to say what it 
consists of. I think that, in general, in such matters 
attentive observation confirms the common fame, and 
that you are very likely to find a people on your travels 
what you found them described to be under the myste- 
rious woodcut in some Peter Parley task-book or play- 
book of your childhood. The French are a light, pleas- 
ure-loving people ; ten years of the Boulevards brings 
no essential amendment to the phrase. The Germans 
are heavy and fair-haired, deep drinkers and strong 
thinkers ; a fortnight at Homburg does n't reverse the 
formula. The only thing to be said is that, as you grow 
older, French lightness and German weightiness become 
more complex ideas. A few weeks ago I left Italy 
in that really demoralized condition into which Italy 

16 



362 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

throws those confiding spirits who give her unlimited 
leave to please them. Beauty, I had come to believe, 
was an exclusively Italian possession, the human face 
was not worth looking at unless redeemed by an Italian 
smile, nor the human voice worth listening to unless 
attuned to Italian vowels. A landscape was no land- 
scape without vines festooned to fig-trees swaying in a 
hot wind — a mountain a hideous excrescence unless 
melting off into a Tuscan haze. But now that I have 
absolutely exchanged vines and figs for corn and cab- 
bages, and violet Apennines for the homely plain of 
Frankfort, and liquids for gutturals, and the Italian 
smile for the German grin, I am much better contented 
than I could have ventured to expect. I have shifted 
my standard of beauty, but it stiU commands a glimpse 
of the divine idea. 

There is something here, too, which pleases, suggests, 
and satisfies. Sitting of an evening in the Kurgarten, 
within ear-shot of the music, you have an almost in- 
spiring feeling that you never have in Italy — a feeling 
that the substantial influences about you are an element 
of the mysterious future. They are of that varied order 
which seems to indicate the large needs of large natures. 
From its pavilion among the trees ring out the notes 
of the loud orchestra, playing Mozart, Beethoven, and 
Weber — such music as no other people has composed, 
as no other people can play it. Bound about in close 
groups sit the sturdy, prosperous natives, with their 
capacious heads, their stout necks, their deep voices, 
their cigars, their beer, their intelligent applause, their 
talk on all things — largely enjoying, and yet strongly 



HOMBURG EEFORMED. 363 

intending. Far away in the mild starlight stretch 
the dusky woods whose gentle murmur, we may sup- 
pose, unfolds here and there to a fanciful German ear 
some prophetic legend of a still larger success and a 
still richer Fatherland. The success of the Fatherland 
one sees reflected more or less^ vividly in all true German 
faces, and the relation between the face and the success 
seems demonstrated by a logic so unerring as to make 
envy vain. It is not the German success I envy, but 
the powerful German temperament and the comprehen- 
sive German brain. With these advantages one need n't 
be restless ; one can afford to give a good deal of time to 
sitting out under the trees over pipes and beer and dis- 
cussion tinged with metaphysics. But success of course 
is most forcibly embodied in the soldiers and officers 
who now form so large a proportion of every German 
group. You see them at all times lounging soberly 
about the gardens ; you look at them (I do, at least) 
with a great deal of impartial deference, and you find in 
them something which seems a sort of pre-established 
negation of an adversary's chances. Compared with 
the shabby little unripe conscripts of France and Italy, 
they are indeed a solid, brilliant phalanx. They are 
generally of excellent stature, and they have faces in 
which the look of education has not spoiled the look of 
good-natured simplicity. They are all equipped in brand- 
new uniforms, and in these warm days they stroll about 
in spotless white trousers. Many of them wear their 
fine blond beards, and they all look like perfect soldiers 
and excellent fellows. It does n't do, of course, for an 
officer to seem too much like a good feUow, and the 



364 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

young captains and adjutants who ornament the Kur- 
garten of an evening seldom err in this direction. But 
they are business-like warriors to a man, and in their 
dark blue uniforms and crimson facings, with their 
swords depending from their unbelted waists through a 
hole in their plain surtouts, they seem to suggest that 
war is somehow a better economy than peace. 

But with all this, I am giving you Hamlet with 
Hamlet himself omitted. Though the gaming is 
stopped, the wells have not dried up, and people still 
drink them, and find them very good. They are indeed 
a very palatable dose, and " medical advice " at Hom- 
burg flatters one's egotism so unblushingly as rather to 
try the faith of people addicted to the old-fashioned 
confusion between the beneficial and the disagreeable. 
You have indeed to get up at half past six o'clock — 
but of a fine summer morning this is no great hardship 
— and you are rewarded on your arrival at the spring 
by triumphant strains of music. There is an orchestra 
perched hard by, which plays operatic selections while 
you pace the shady walks and wait for your second 
glass. All the Homburg world is there ; it 's the fash- 
ionable hour ; and at first I paid the antique preju- 
dice just mentioned the tribute of thinking it was all 
too frivolous to be salutary. There are half a dozen 
springs, scattered through a charming wooded park, 
where you may find innumerable shady strolls and 
rustic benches in bosky nooks, where it is pleasant to 
lounge with a good light book. In the afternoon I 
drink at a spring with whose luxurious prettiness I still 
find it hard to associate a doctor's prescription. It 



HOMBUEG REFORMED. 365 

reminds me of a back-scene at the theatre, and I feel as 
if I were drinking some fictitious draught prepared by 
the property-man ; or rather, being a little white tem- 
ple rising on slim columns among still green shades, it 
reminds me of some spot in the antique world where 
the goddess Hygeia was worshipped by thirsty pilgrims ; 
and I am disappointed to find that the respectable 
young woman who dips my glass is not a ministering 
nymph in a tunic and sandals. Beyond this valley of 
healing waters lie the great woods of fir and birch and 
beech and oak which cover the soft slopes of the Tau- 
nus. They are full of pleasant paths and of the fre- 
quent benches which testify to the German love of sit- 
ting in the open air. I don't know why it is — because, 
perhaps, we have all read so many Teutonic legends 
and ballads — but it seems natural in Germany to be 
in a wood. One need have no very rare culture, indeed, 
to find a vague old-friendliness in every feature of the 
landscape. The villages with their peaked roofs, cov- 
ered with red scalloped shingles, and the brown beams 
making figures on the plastered cottage walls, the grape- 
vine on the wall, the swallows in the eaves, the Haus- 
frau, sickle in hand, with her yellow hair in a top-knot 
and her short blue skirt showing her black stockings 
— what is it all but a background to one of Eichter's 
charming woodcuts ? I never see a flock of geese on 
the roadside, and a little tow-pated maiden driving them 
with a forked switch, without thinking of Grimm's 
household tales. I look around for the old crone who 
is to come and inform her she is a king's daughter. I 
see nothing but the white Kaiserliche Deutsche sign- 



366 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

post, telling one that this is such and such a district of 
the Landwehr. But with such easy magic as this I am 
perhaps right in not especially regretting that the late 
enchantress of the Kursaal should have been handed 
over to the police. 



DARMSTADT. 

Darmstadt, September 6, 1873. 

SPENDING the summer just past at Homburg, I 
have been conscious of a sort of gentle chronic 
irritation of a natural sympathy with the whole race 
of suppressed, diminished, and mutilated sovereigns. 
This was fostered by my frequent visits to the great 
dispeopled Schloss, about whose huge and awkward 
bulk the red roofs of the little town, as seen from a 
distance, cluster with an air of feudal allegiance, and 
which stands there as a respectable makeweight to the 
hardly scantier mass of the florid, fresh-colored Kursaal. 
It was formerly the appointed residence of the Land- 
grafs of the very diminutive state of Hesse-Homburg, 
the compact circumference of which these modest poten- 
tates might have the satisfaction of viewing, any fine 
morning, without a telescope, from their dressing-room 
windows. It is something of course to be monarch of 
a realm which slopes away with the slope of the globe 
into climates which it requires an effort to believe in 
and are part of the regular stock of geography; but 
perhaps we are apt to underestimate the peculiar com- 
placency of a sovereign to whose possessions the blue 
horizon makes a liberal margin, and shows him his 



368 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

cherished inheritance visibly safe and sound, undipped, 
unmenaced, shining like a jewel on its velvet cushion. 
This modest pleasure the Landgrafs of Hesse-Homburg 
must have enjoyed in perfection ; the chronicle of their 
state-progresses should be put upon the same shelf as 
Xavier de Maistre's " Voyage autour de ma Chambre.'* 
Though small, however, this rounded particle of sov- 
ereignty was still visible to the naked eye of diplomacy, 
and Herr von Bismarck, in 1866, swallowed it as 
smoothly as a gentleman following a tonic regime dis- 
poses of his homoeopathic pellet. It had been merged 
shortly before in the neighboring empire of Hesse- 
Darmstadt, but promptly after Sadowa it was " ceded " 
to Prussia. Whoever is the loser, it has not been a 
certain lounging American on hot afternoons. The 
gates of the Schloss are now wide open, and the great 
garden is public property, and much resorted to by 
old gentlemen who dust off the benches with ban- 
dannas before sitting down, and by sheepish soldiers 
with affectionate sweethearts. Picturesquely, the palace 
is all it should be — very huge, very bare, very ugly, 
with great clean courts, in which round-barrelled Meck- 
lenburg coach-horses must often have stood waiting for 
their lord and master to rise from table. The gateways 
are adorned with hideous sculptures of about 1650, rep- 
resenting wigged warriors on corpulent chargers, cork- 
screw pilasters, and scroll-work like the " flourishes " 
of a country writing-master — the whole glazed over 
with brilliant red paint. In the middle of the larger 
court stands an immense isolated round tower, painted 
white, and seen from all the country about. The 



DARMSTADT. 369 

gardens have very few flowers, and the sound of the 
rake nowadays is seldom heard on the gravel ; but 
there are plenty of fine trees — some really stupendous 
poplars, untrimmed and spreading abroad like oaks, 
chestnuts which would make a figure in Italy, beeches 
which would be called "rather good" in England; 
plenty of nooks and bowers and densely woven arcades, 
triumphs of old-fashioned garden ry ; and a large dull- 
bosomed pond into which the unadorned castle-walls 
peep from above the trees. Such as it is, it is a place 
a small prince had rather keep than lose ; and as I sat 
under the beeches — remembering that I was in the 
fatherland of ghost-stories — I used to fancy the warm 
twilight was pervaded by a thin spectral infiuence from 
this slender stream of empire, and that I could hear 
vague supernatural Achs I of regret among the bushes, 
and see the glimmer of broad-faced phantoms at the 
windows. One very hot Sunday the Emperor came, 
passed up the main street under several yards of red 
and white calico, and spent a couple of days at the 
Schloss. I don't know whether he saw any reproach- 
ful ghosts there, but he found, I believe, a rather scanty 
flesh-and-blood welcome in the town. The burgomas- 
ters measured off the proper number of festoons, and 
the innkeepers hung out their flags, but the townsfolk, 
who know their new master chiefly as the grim old 
wizard who has dried up the golden stream which used 
to flow so bounteously at the Kursaal, took an outing 
indeed, like good Germans, and stared sturdily at the 
show, but paid nothing for it in the way of hurrahs. 
The Emperor, meanwhile, rattled up and down the 

16* X 



370 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

street in his light barouche, wearing under his white 
eyebrows and mustache the physiognomy of a person- 
age quite competent to dispense with the approbation 
of ghosts and shopkeepers. "Homburg may have 
ceased to be Hessian, but evidently it is not yet Prus- 
sian/' I said to a friend ; and he hereupon reminded me 
that I was within a short distance of a more eloquent 
memento of the energy of Bismarck, and that I had 
better come over and take a look at the blighted Duchy 
of Darmstadt. I have followed his advice, and have 
been strolling about in quest of impressions. It is for 
the reader to say whether my impressions were worth 
a journey of an hour and a half 

I confess, to begin with, that they form no very ter- 
rible tale — that I saw none of the " prominent citizens" 
confined in chains, and no particular symptoms of the 
ravages of a brutal soldiery. Indeed, as you walk into 
the town through the grand, dull, silent street which 
leads from the railway station, you seem to perceive 
that the genius loci has never been frighted, like Othello's 
Cyprus, from its propriety. You behold this coDiforta- 
ble spirit embodied in heroic bronze on the top of a 
huge red sandstone column, in the shape of the Grand- 
Duke Louis the First, who, though a very small poten- 
tate, surveys posterity from a most prodigious altitude. 
He was a father to his people, and some fifty years ago 
he created the heaux quartiers of Darmstadt, out of the 
midst of which his effigy rises, looking down upon the 
Trafalgar Square, the Place de la Concorde, of the lo- 
cality. Behind him the fine, dull street pursues its 
coarse and pauses in froMt of the florid faQade of the 



DARMSTADT. 371 

Schloss. This entrance into Darmstadt responds ex- 
actly to the fanciful tourist's preconceptions, and as soon 
as I looked up the melancholy vista, my imagination 
fell to rubbing its hands and to whispering that this 
indeed was the ghost of a little German court-city — 
a mouldering Modena or Ferrara of the ]N'orth. I have 
never known a little court-city, having, by ill-luck, come 
into the world a day too late ; but I like to think of 
them, to visit them in these blank early years of their 
long historic sleep, and to try and guess what they 
must be dreaming of. They seem to murmur, as they 
snore everlastingly, of a very snug little social system 
— of gossiping whist-parties in wainscoted grand-ducal 
parlors, of susceptible Aulic Councillors and sesthetic 
canonesses, of emblazoned commanders-in-chief of five 
hundred warriors in periwigs, of blond young hussars, 
all gold-lace and billet-doux, of a miniature world of 
precedents, jealousies and intrigues, ceremonies and 
superstitions — an oppressively dull world, doubtless, 
to your fanciful tourist if he had been condemned to 
spend a month in it. But Darmstadt, obviously, was 
not dull to its own sense in the days before Bismarck, 
and doubtless the pith of its complaint of this terrible 
man is that he has made it so. All around Duke 
Louis's huge red pedestal rises a series of sober-faced 
palaces for the transaction of the affairs of this little 
empire. Before each of them is a striped red-and- white 
sentry-box, with a soldier in a spiked helmet mounting 
guard. These public offices all look highly respectable, 
but they have an air of sepulchral stillness. Here and 
there, doubtless, in their echoing chambers, is to be 



372 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

heard the scratching of the bureaucratic quill; but I 
imagine that neither the home nor the foreign affairs 
of Hesse-Darmstadt require nowadays an army of func- 
tionaries, and that if some grizzled old clerk were to 
give you an account of his avocations, they would bear 
a family likeness to those of Charles Lamb at the India 
House. There are half a dozen droshkies drawn up at 
the base of the monument, with the drivers sitting in 
the sun and wondering sleepily whether any one of the 
three persons in sight, up and down the street, will be 
likely to want a carriage. They wake up as I approach 
and look at me very hard ; but they are phlegmatic 
German drivers, and they neither hail me with persua- 
sive cries nor project their vehicles forcibly upon me, 
as would certainly be the case at Modena or Ferrara. 
But I pass along and ascend the street, and find some- 
thing that is really very Ferrarese. The grand-ducal 
Schloss rises in an immense mass out of a great crooked 
square, which has a very pretty likeness to an Italian 
piazza. Some of the houses have G-othic gables, and 
these have thrifty shop-fronts and a general air of paint 
and varnish ; but there is shabbiness enough, and sun, 
and space, and bad smells, and old women under colored 
umbrellas selling cabbages and plums, and several per- 
sons loafing in a professional manner, and, in the midst 
of it all, the great moated palace, with soldiers hanging 
over the parapets of the little bridges, and the inner 
courts used as a public thoroughfare. On one side, 
behind the shabby Gothic gables, is huddled that elderly 
Darmstadt to which Duke Louis affixed the modern 
mask of which his own effigy is the most eminent 



DARMSTADT. 373 

feature. A mask of some sort old Darmstadt most 
certainly needs, and it were well if it might have been 
one of those glass covers which in Germany are de- 
posited over too savory dishes. The little crooked, 
gabled streets presume quite too audaciously on un- 
cleanness being an element of the picturesque. The 
gutters stroll along with their hands in their pockets, 
as it were, and pause in great pools before crossings and 
dark archways to embrace their tributary streams, till 
the odorous murmur of their confluence quite smothers 
the voice of legend. There is dirtiness and dirtiness. 
Sometimes, picturesquely, it is very much to the point ; 
But the American traveller in Germany will generally 
prefer not to enjoy local color in this particular form, 
for it invariably reminds him of the most sordid, the 
most squalid prose he knows — the corner-groceries 
and the region of the docks in his native metropolis. 

The Schloss, however, is picturesque without abate- 
ment, and it seems to me a great pity there should not 
be some such monumental edifice in the middle of every 
town, to personify the municipal soul, as it were, to 
itself If it can be beautiful, so much the better ; but 
the Schloss at Darmstadt is ugly enough, and yet — to 
the eye — it amply serves its purpose. The two facades 
toward the square date from the middle of the last cen- 
tury, and are characteristically dreary and solemn, but 
they hide a great rambling structure of a quainter time : 
irregular courts, archways boring away into darkness, a 
queer great yellow bell-tower dating from the sixteenth 
century, a pile of multitudinous windows, roofs, and 
chimneys. Seen from the adjacent park, all this masses 



374 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

itself up into the semblance of a fantastic citadel. One 
rarely finds a citadel with a handsomer moat. The 
moat at Darmstadt yawns down out of the market- 
place into a deep verdurous gulf, with sloping banks 
of turf, on which tame shrubs are planted — mingled 
with the wild ones lodged in the stout foundations. 
It forms, indeed, below the level of the street, a charm- 
ing little belt of grass and flowers. The Schloss pos- 
sesses, moreover, as it properly should, a gallery of 
pictures, to which I proceeded to seek admission. I 
reflected, on my way, that it is of the first importance, 
picturesquely speaking, that the big building which, 
as I just intimated, should resume to its own sense the 
civic individuality of every substantial town, should 
always have a company of soldiers lounging under its 
portal and grouped about the guard-room. A green 
moat, a great archway, a guard-room opening out of 
its shadow, a couple of pacing sentinels, a group of 
loafing musketeers, a glimpse on one side of a sunny 
market-place, on the other of a dusky court — com- 
bine the objects as you may, they make a picture ; they 
seem for the moment, as you pass, and pause, and 
glance, to transport you into legend. Of course the 
straddling men-at-arms who helped to render me this 
service were wearers of the spiked helmet. The G-rand- 
Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt still occupies the Schloss, and 
enjoys a nominal authority. I believe that he holds 
it, for special reasons, on rather easy terms, but I do 
not envy the emotions of the grand-ducal breast when 
he sees a row of these peculiarly uncompromising little 
head-pieces bristling and twinkling under his windows. 



DARMSTADT. 375 

It can hardly be balm to bis resentment to know that 
they sometimes conceal the flaxen pates of his own 
hereditary Hessians. The spiked helmets, of course, 
salute rigorously when this very limited monarch passes 
in and out; but I sometimes think it fortunate, under 
these circumstances, that the average German counte- 
nance has not a turn for ironical expression. The Duke, 
indeed, in susceptible moods, might take an airing in 
his own palace without driving abroad at all. There 
is apparently no end to its corridors and staircases, 
and I found it a long journey to the picture-gallery. I 
spent half an hour, to begin with, in the library, wait- 
ing till the custodian was at liberty to attend to me. 
The half-hour, however, was not lost, as I was enter- 
tained by a very polite librarian, with a green shade 
over his eyes, and as I filled my lungs, moreover, with 
what I was in the humor to call the atmosphere of 
German science. It was a very warm day, but the 
windows were tight-closed, in the manner of the coun- 
try, and had been closed, presumably, since the da3^s 
of Louis the First. The air was as dry as iron filings ; 
it smelt of old bindings, of the insides of old books ; it 
tasted of dust and snuff. Here and there a Herr Pro- 
fessor, walled in with circumjacent authorities, was 
burying his nose in a folio ; the gray light seemed to 
add a coating of dust to the tiers of long brown shelves. 
I came away with a headache, and that exalted esteem 
for the German brain, as a mere working organ, which 
invariably ensues upon my observation of the physical 
conditions of German life. I don't know that I received 
any very distinct impression from the picture-gallery 



376 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

beyond that of there being such and such a number 
of acres more of mouldering brush-work in the world. 
It was a good deal like the library, terribly close, and 
lined for room after room (it is a long series) with tiers 
of dusky brown canvases, on which the light of the 
unwashed windows seemed to turn sallow and joyless. 
There are a great many fine names on the frames, but 
they rarely correspond to anything very fine within 
them, though, indeed, there are several specimens of 
the early German school which are quite welcome (to 
my mind) to their assumed "originality." Early or 
late, German art rarely seems to me a happy adventure. 
Two or three of the rooms were filled with large ex- 
amples of the modern German landscape school, before 
which I lingered, but not for the pleasure of it. I was 
reflecting that the burden of French philosophy just 
now is the dogma that the Germans are a race oi faux 
honshommes ; that their transcendental aesthetics are a 
mere kicking up of dust to cover their picking and 
stealing ; and that their frank-souled naivete is no 
better than a sharper's "alias." I do not pretend to 
weigh the charge in a general sense, but I certainly 
think that a good French patriot, in my place, would 
have cried out that he had caught the hypocrites in 
the act. These blooming views of Switzerland and 
Italy seemed to me the most dishonest things in the 
world, and I was puzzled to understand how so very 
innocent an affair as a landscape in oils could be made 
such a vehicle of offence. These were extremely 
clever; the art of shuffling away trouble has rarely 
been brought to greater perfection. It is evidently an 



DARMSTADT. 377 

elaborate system ; tliere is a school ; the pictures were 
all from different hands, and the precious recipe had 
been passed round the circle. 

But why should I talk of bad pictures, since I 
brought away from Darmstadt the memory of one of 
the best in the world ? It forms the sole art-treasure 
of the place, and I duly went in quest of it ; but I 
kept it in reserve as one keeps the best things, and 
meanwhile I strolled in the Herrengarten. The fond- 
ness of Germans for a garden, wherever a garden can 
be conceived, is one of their most amiable characteris- 
tics, and I should be curious to know how large a sec- 
tion of the total soil of the fatherland is laid out in 
rusty lawns and gravel-paths, and adorned with beechen 
groves and bowers. The garden-hours of one's life, as 
I may say, are not the least agreeable, and there are 
more garden-hours in German lives than in most others. 
But I shall not describe my garden-hours at Darmstadt. 
Part of them was spent in walking around the theatre, 
which stands close beside the Schloss, with its face 
upon the square and its back among the lawns and 
bowers. The theatre, in the little court-city of my 
regrets, is quite an affair of state, and the manager 
second only in importance to the prime-minister or the 
commander-in-chief. Or rather the Grand-Duke is 
manager himself, and the leading actress, as a matter 
of course, his morganatic wife. The present Grand- 
Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, I believe, is a zealous patron 
of the drama, and maintains a troupe of comedians, 
who doubtless do much to temper the dulness of his 
capital. The present theatre is simply a picturesque 



378 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. ♦ 

ruin, having been lately burned down, for all the world 
like an American opera-house. But the actors have 
found a provisional refuge, and I have just been pre- 
sented with the programme of the opening night of the 
w^inter season. I saw the rest of Darmstadt as I took 
my way to the palace of Prince Karl. It was a very 
quiet pilgrimage, and I perhaps met three people in 
the long, dull, proper street through which it led me. 
One of them was a sentinel with a spiked helmet 
marching before the snug little palace of the Prince 
Louis — the gentleman who awhile ago married the 
Princess Alice of England. Another was a school-boy 
in spectacles, nursing a green bag full of Greek roots, I 
suppose, of whom I asked my way ; and the third was 
the sturdy little musketeer who was trying to impart a 
reflet of authority to the neat little white house occu- 
pied by the Prince Karl. But this frowning soldier is 
no proper symbol of the kindly custom of the house. 
I was admitted unconditionally, ushered into the little 
drawing-room, and allowed half an hour's undisturbed 
contemplation of the beautiful Holbein — the famous 
picture of the Meyer family. The reader interested in 
such matters may remember the discussion maintained 
two years since, at the time of the general exhibition 
of the younger Holbein's works in Dresden, as to the 
respective merits — and I believe the presumptive pri- 
ority in date — of this Darmstadt picture and the pres- 
entation of the same theme which adorns the Dresden 
Gallery. I forget how the question was settled — 
whether, indeed, it was settled at all, and I have never 
seen the Dresden picture ; but it seems to me that if I 



DARMSTADT. 379 

were to choose a Holbein, this one would content me. 
It represents a sort of plainly lovely Virgin holding 
her child, crowned with a kind of gorgeous episcopal 
crown, and worshipped by six kneeling figures — the 
worthy Goodman Meyer, his wife, and their progeniture. 
It is a wonderfully solid masterpiece, and so full of 
wholesome human substance that I should think its 
owner could go about his daily work the better — eat 
and drink and sleep and perform the various functions 
of life more largely and smoothly — for having it con- 
stantly before his eyes. I was not disappointed, and I 
may now confess that my errand at Darmstadt had 
been much more to see the " Holbeinische Gemalde " 
than to examine the trail of the serpent — the foot- 
prints of Bismarck. 



IN HOLLAND. 

The Hague, August 8, 1874. 

IT would amount to positive impudence, I suppose, to 
introduce these few impressions of Dutch scenery 
by an overt allusion to the beauties of the Ehine. And 
yet it was by the Ehine, a few days since, that I en- 
tered Holland ; and it was along an arm of the Ehine, 
subdued to the likeness of a homely Dutch canal, that 
I wandered this afternoon in drowsy Leyden. As many 
as thirty years ago, I believe, it was good taste to make 
an apology for a serious mention, of the descriptive 
sort, of the vineyards of Bingen or the cloister of Non- 
nenwerth ; and if the theme had been rubbed thread- 
bare then, it can hardly be considered presentable now. 
But thus much I may boldly affirm, that if my corrupt 
modern consciousness had not assured me that these 
were terribly faded charms, I should not have guessed 
it from the testimony of my eyes. After platitudes, as 
well as after battles, I^ature has a way — all her own 
— of renewing herself ; and in a decent attitude, at the 
bow of the boat, with my face to Nature and my back 
to man, I ventured to salute the castled crags as frankly 
as if I were making a voyage of discovery. The time 
seems to me to have come round again when one ought 



IN HOLLAND. 381 

really to say a good word for them. I insist npon the 
merits of no particular member of the crumbling fra- 
ternity ; there are many worthy men whose pockets it 
might be awkward to examine ; and the Ehenish dun- 
geons, from a more familiar standpoint than the deck 
of the steamer, may prove to be half buried in beer- 
bottles and lemon-peel. But they still pass their ro- 
mantic watchword from echo to echo all along the line, 
and they " compose " as bravely between the river and 
the sky as if fifty years of sketching and sonneteering 
had done nothing to tame them. The fine thing about 
the Ehine is that it has that which, when applied to 
architecture and painting, is called style. It is in the 
grand manner — on the liberal scale ; that is, it is on 
the liberal scale while it lasts. There is less of it, in 
time, than I had been remembering these fifteen years. 
The classic sites come and go within an easy four hours ; 
and if you embark at Mayence you leave the last and 
most perfect of the castled crags — the Drachenfels — 
behind you just as your organism, physical and mental, 
is being thoroughly attuned to the supreme felicity of 
river navigation. It was a grayish day as I passed, and 
the Drachenfels looked as if it had been stolen from a 
background of Claude to do service in the Ehenish fore- 
ground. It has the ideal, romantic contour. 

It stands there, however, like some last ringing word 
in an interrupted phrase. The vast white river sweeps 
along into Holland on a level with its banks, finally to 
die in a slush of marshes and a mesh of canals, within 
sound of the surge of the North Sea. I left it to its 
destiny, and gathered my first impressions of Holland 



382 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

from the window of the train. The most pertinent 
thing one may say of these first impressions is that 
they are exactly, to the letter, what one expects them 
to be. If yon come this way, as I did, chiefly with an 
eye to Dutch pictures, your first acquisition is a sense, 
no longer an amiable inference, but a direct perception, 
of the undiluted accuracy of Dutch painters. You 
have seen it all before; it is vexatiously familiar; it 
was hardly worth while to have come ! At Amsterdam, 
at Leyden, at The Hague, and in the country between 
them, this is half your state of mind ; when you are 
looking at the originals, you seem to be looking at the 
copies ; and when you are looking at the copies, you 
seem to be looking at the originals. Is it a canal-side 
in Haarlem, or is it a Van der Heyden ? Is it a price- 
less Hobbema, or is it a meagre pastoral vista, stretch- 
ing away from the railway track ? The maid-servants 
in the streets seem to have stepped out of the frame of 
a Gerard Dow, and appear equally adapted for stepping 
back again. You have to rub your eyes to ascertain 
their normal situation. And so you wander about, with 
art and nature playing so assiduously into each other's 
hands that your experience of Holland becomes some- 
thing singularly compact and complete in itself — 
striking no chords that lead elsewhere, and asking no 
outside help to unfold itself This is what we mean 
when we say, as we do at every turn, that Holland is so 
curious. Italy is not curious, as a general thing, nor is 
England, in its leading features. They are simply both 
eminent specimens of a sort of beauty which pervades 
in a greater or less degree all our conceptions of the 



IN HOLLAND. 383 

beautiful. We admire them because tliey stand, as it 
were, in the high-road of admiration, and whether we 
pass them at a run or at a walk our pace is part of the 
regular aesthetic business of life. But to enjoy the Low 
Countries, we have to put on a very particular pair of 
spectacles and bend our nose well over our task, and, 
beyond our consciousness that our gains are real gains, 
remain decidedly at loss how to classify them. This is 
the charming thing in Holland — the way one feels 
one's observation lowered to a relish of the harmonies 
of the minor key; persuaded to respect small things 
and take note of small differences; so that really a 
week's sojourn here, if properly used, ought to make 
one at the worst a more reasonable, and at the best a 
more kindly, person. The beauty which is no beauty ; 
the ugliness which is not ugliness ; the poetry which is 
prose, and the prose which is poetry; the landscape 
which seems to be all sky until you have taken particu- 
lar pains to discover it, and turns out to be half water 
when you have discovered it ; the virtues, when they 
are graceful (like cleanliness), exaggerated to a vice, 
and when they are sordid (like the getting and keeping 
of money), refined to a dignity; the mild gray light 
which produced in Eembrandt the very genius of chiar- 
oscuro ; the stretch of whole provinces on the princi- 
ples of a billiard- table, which produced a school of 
consummate landscapists ; the extraordinary reversal 
of custom, in which man seems, with a few windmills 
and ditches, to do what he will, and Providence, hold- 
ing the North Sea in the hollow of his hand, what he 
can — all these elements of the general spectacle in 



384 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

this entertaining country at least give one's regular 
habits of thought the stimulus of a little confusion, and 
make one feel that one is dealing with an original genius. 
The curious fortunately excludes neither the impress- 
ive nor the agreeable ; and Amsterdam, where I took 
my first Dutch walk, is a stately city, even though its 
street-vistas do look as if they were pictured on a tea- 
caddy or a hand-screen. They have for the most part 
a broad, sluggish canal in the middle, on either side of 
which a row of perfectly salubrious, but extremely at- 
tenuated trees grow out of a highly cultivated soil of 
compact yellow bricks. Cultivated I call it by a proper 
license, for it is periodically raked by the broom and 
the scrubbing-brush, and religiously manured with soap- 
suds. You lose no time, of course, in drawing the in- 
evitable parallel between Amsterdam and Venice, and 
it is well worth drawing, as an illustration of the uses 
to which the same materials may be put by different 
minds. Sky and sea in both cases, with architecture 
between ; winding sea-channels washing the feet of 
goodly houses erected with the profits of trade. And 
yet the Dutch city is a complete reversal of the Italian, 
and its founders might have carefully studied Venetian 
effects with the set purpose of producing exactly the 
opposite ones. It produces them in the moral line 
even more vividly than in the material. It is not that 
one place is all warm color and the other all cold ; one 
all shimmer and softness and mellow interfusion of 
every possible phase of ruin, and the other rigidity, 
angularity, opacity, prosperity, in their very essence ; it 
is more than anything that they tell of such different 



IN HOLLAND. 385 

lives and of such a different view of life. The outward 
expression on one side is perfect poetry, and on the 
other is perfect prose ; and the marvel is the way in 
which thrifty Amsterdam imparts the prosaic turn to 
things which in Venice seem the perfect essence of 
poetry. Take, for instance, the silence and quiet of the 
canals ; it has in the two places a difference of quality 
which it is almost impossible to express. In the one 
it is the stillness of order, and in the other of vacancy 
— the sleep of idleness and the sleep of rest ; the quiet 
that comes of letting everything go by the board, and 
the quiet that comes of doing things betimes and being 
able to sit with folded hands and say they are well 
done. In one of George Eliot's novels there is a por- 
trait of a thrifty farmer's wife who rose so early in the 
morning to do her work that by ten o'clock it was all 
over, and she was at her wit's end to know what to do 
with her day. This good woman seems to me an ex- 
cellent image of the genius of Amsterdam as it is 
reflected in the house-fronts — I penetrated no deeper. 
It is impossible to imagine anything more expressive 
of the numerous ideas represented by the French epi- 
thet bourgeois than these straight facades of clean black 
brick capped with a rococo gable of stone painted white, 
and armed like the forehead of the unicorn with a lit- 
tle horizontal horn — a bracket and pulley for hauling 
storable goods into the attic. The famous Dutch 
cleanliness seems to me quite on a level with its rep- 
utation, and asserts itself in the most ingenious and 
ludicrous ways. A rosy serving-maid, redolent of soap- 
suds from her white cap to her white sabots, stands 

17 T 



386 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

squirting water from a queer little engine of polished 
copper over the majestic front of a genteel mansion 
whose complexion is not a visible shade less immaculate 
than her own. The performance suggests a dozen ques- 
tions, and you can only answer them all with a laugh. 
What is she doing, and why is she doing it ? Does she 
imagine the house has a speck or two which it is of 
consequence to remove, or is the squirt applied merely 
for purposes of light refreshment ■ — of endearment, as 
it were ? Where could the speck or two possibly have 
come from, unless produced by spontaneous generation ? 
There are no specks in the road, which is a neat ^ar- 
quet of scoured and polished brick ; nor on the trees, 
whose trunks are to all appearance carefully sponged 
every morning. The speck exists evidently only as 
a sort of mathematical point, capable of extension, in 
the good woman's Batavian brain, and the operation 
with her copper kettle is, as the metaphysicians would 
say, purely subjective. It is a necessity, not as regards 
the house, but as regards her own temperament. Of a 
dozen harmlessly factitious necessities of the same sort, 
the canal-sides at Amsterdam offer lively evidence. 
E"othing could be more thoroughly in keeping with the 
hourgeois spirit than the way in which you everywhere 
find this brilliant cleanliness and ceremonious thrift 
playing the part, not of a convenience, but of a restric- 
tion ; not of a means, but of an end. The windows 
are of those huge plates of glass which offer a delect- 
ably uninterrupted field for friction ; / but they are 
masked internally by thick white blinds, invariably 
drawn, and the only use of their transparency to any 



t 



IN HOLLAND. 387 

mortal is to enable the passer-by to examine the tex- 
ture of the stuff. The front doors are hedged in with 
little square padlocked barriers, to guard the doorsteps 
from the pollution of footprints, and the visitor must 
pocket his pride and apply at an humbler portal with 
the baker and the milkman. In such houses must 
dwell people whose nerves are proof against the irrita- 
tion of minute precautions — people who cover their 
books with white paper and find occasion for a week's 
conversation in a mysterious drop of candle-grease on a 
tablecloth. The traveller with an eye for details will 
find some eloquence in the fact that, though the canals 
at Amsterdam and Leyden offer continually this charm- 
ing pretext of trees by a water-side, there is not in 
their whole length a single bench for a lounge and a 
half-hour's aesthetic relish of the situation. The trav- 
eller in question though, shrewd fellow, will not be pre- 
vented by the absence of benches from getting it, as he 
looks up and down and sees the wide green barges 
come floating through the respectable stillness, and the 
quaint old scroll-work of the gables peep out through 
the meagre density of the trees. 

At The Hague, evidently, people take life in a lighter, 
more irresponsible fashion. There are two or three 
benches by the canals and an air of mitigated devotion 
to compound interest. There are wide, tranquil squares, 
planted in the middle with shady walks and bordered 
with fine old abodes of moneyed leisure, where you 
may boldly ring at the front door. The Hague is in 
fact a very charming little city, and I should be at a 
loss to say how much I find it to my taste. It is the 



388 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

model of a minor capital; small enough for conven- 
ience and compact sociability, and yet large enough to 
exhibit certain metropolitan airs and graces. It is one 
of the cities which please indefinably on a short ac- 
quaintance and prompt one's fretful fancy to say that 
just this, at last, is the place where we could come and 
lead the (from the worldly point of view) ideal life. It 
hits the happy medium between the bustling and the 
stagnant ; it is Dutch enough for all sorts of comfort- 
able virtues, and, where these intermit, it is English 
and French, and, in its diplomatic character, cosmo- 
politan. There must be very pleasant things done 
here, and I hope, for symmetry's sake, there are pleas- 
ant people to do them worthily. I imagine there are. 
But I do wrong to consume valuable space in these 
fruitless speculations when I have not yet said a word 
on the topic on which I had it chiefly at heart to touch. 
A week in Holland is necessarily a week in the com- 
pany of Eembrandt and Paul Potter, Euysdael and 
Gerard Dow. These admirable artists have had my 
best attention, but I do not know that they have given 
me any new impressions, or indeed that, in the literal 
meaning of the word, they have given me any im- 
pressions at all. I looked for a long time, only this 
morning, at the hand of Madame van Mieris in the 
little picture in the Museum here, by her husband, 
representing him and his wife playing with a tiny 
spaniel. He is pulling the dog's ear and she is press- 
ing it against her bosom with an arm bare to the elbow. 
It seemed to me that it was worth the journey to Hol- 
land simply to see this appreciative husband's version 



IN HOLLAND. 389 

of his wife's hand, and that if I had seen nothing else 
I should have been repaid ; but beyond producing this 
eminently practical reflection, the picture was not sug- 
gestive. I find in my guide-book, on the margin of 
the page which dilates upon the great Van der Heist 
at Amsterdam (the Banquet of the Civic Guard), the 
inscription in pencil — superb, superb, superb! But 
this simply connotes enjoyment and not criticism. Let 
me however have the satisfaction of repeating, in ink 
for the printer, that the picture is superb. To the 
great treasure (after Rembrandt's Lesson of Anatomy) 
of the Museum here — Paul Potter's famous Bull — 
one would willingly pay some more elaborate compli- 
ment ; not because it is a stronger work (on the con- 
trary), but because it is the work of a lad of twenty- 
two. The subject is the most prosaic conceivable, and 
the treatment is perfectly in keeping ; but if one con- 
siders the magnificent success of the enterprise from 
the painter's own point of view, there is certainly real 
poetry in the fact of his youth. It is hardly less true 
of Eembrandt than of his various smaller comrades 
(unusual as the judgment may seem), that he is not 
an intellectually suggestive painter. There are no 
ideas in Ostade and Terburg, in Metzu and Ruysdael 
(who, by the way, gives me the largest sum of tranquil 
pleasure of any painter of the school) ; but you bear 
them no grudge, for they give you no reason to expect 
them. It is one of the regular traditions, however, 
that Rembrandt does, and I can only say that in 
this case tradition has distinctly missed her way. It 
is the more singular that he should not, inasmuch as 



390 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

(I should go so far as to say) lie was really not, strictly 
speaking, a painter. He was perfectly arbitrary, and 
lie kept on terms with observation only so long as it 
suited him. This may be verified by reference to any 
of the most delusively picturesque of his works. They 
are magnificent ; but compare them, for simple verity, 
with the little Adrian van Ostade in the Van der Hoop 
collection, and compare them, for thought, with any 
fine Tintoretto. 



i 



IN BELGIUM. 

Ostend, August 14, 1874. 

BELGIUM, in most itineraries, is visited conjointly 
with Holland. This is all very well so long as 
Belgium is visited first; and my advice to travellers 
who relish a method in their emotions is in this region 
to reverse the plan which is generally most judicious, 
and proceed in all confidence from south to north. 
Passing from the Low Countries into Flanders, you 
come back into the common world again — into a 
picturesque phase of it, certainly, and a country rich 
in architectural and artistic treasures. But you miss 
that something, individual and exquisite, which forms 
the charm of Holland, and of which, during the last 
forty-eight hours of my stay there (it seems a part of 
the delicacy of all things that one calculates one's stay 
in the little Dutch garden by hours), my impression 
became singularly deep. It has become deeper still 
in retrospect, as such things do, and there are moments 
when I feel as if in coming away I had wantonly 
turned my back upon the abode of tranquil happiness. 
I keep seeing a green canal with a screen of thin- 
stemmed trees on one side of it, and a foot-path, not 



\ 



392 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

at all sinuous, on the other. Beside the foot-path is 
a red-brick wall, superstitiously clean, and if you follow 
it a little while you come to a large iron gate flanked 
with high posts, with balls on top. Although the 
climate is damp, the ancient iron-work of the gate has 
not a particle of rust, and its hinges, as you turn it, 
are in perfect working order. Beyond it is a garden 
planted with tulips of a hundred kinds, and in the 
middle of the garden is a pond. Over the pond is 
stretched, from edge to edge, a sort of trellis of tense 
cord, which at first excites your surprise. In a moment, 
however, you perceive the propriety of the pond's being 
carefully guarded, for its contents are singularly pre- 
cious. They consist of an immense number of gigantic 
water-lilies, sitting motionless among their emerald 
pads, and of a brilliancy and softness which make you 
fancy they are modelled in wax ; of a thousand little 
gold-fishes, of so deep a crimson that they look as if 
they were taken out every morning and neatly var- 
nished over with a fine brush ; and, lastly, of a majestic 
swan, of the purest porcelain. About the swan there 
is no doubt; he is of the finest Dutch delf — a sub- 
stance which at a certain distance looks as well as 
flossy feathers, and has the advantage that a creature 
composed of it cannot circulate to the detriment of 
varnished flshes and waxen lilies. I do not know how 
this pond looks on paper, but in nature, if one may call 
it nature, it was delicious. There was a skyful of 
rolling gray clouds, with two or three little patches of 
blue, and over the tulip-beds there played a little cool 
breeze, with its edge just blurred by dampness. Under 



IN BELGIUM. 393 

the trees was just one bencli, but it was strictly suf- 
ficient. 

I must not linger on Dutch benches, however, with 
all the art-wealth of Flanders awaiting me. I have 
by no means in fact examined it all, and have had to 
pay the tourist's usual tribute to reluctant omission. 
In such cases, if you are travelling con amove, the 
things omitted assume to the mind's eye a kind of 
mocking perfection, and the dozen successes of your 
journey seem a small compensation for this fatal failure. 
There is a certain little hotel-de-ville at Louvain and a 
cathedral at Tournay which make a dehcious figure 
in the excellent hand-book of M. Du Pays; but I 
hasten to declare that I have not seen them, and am 
well aware that my observations are by so much the 
less valuable. I first made acquaintance with Belgium, 
however, through the cathedral of Antwerp, and this 
is a first-rate introduction. I went into it of a Sunday 
morning during mass, and immediately perceived that 
I was in a sturdily Cathohc country. The immense 
edifice was crowded with worshippers, and their man- 
ner was much more receuilli, as the phrase is, than that 
of the faithful in Italian churches. This too in spite 
of the fact that the great Eubenses were unveiled in 
honor of the day, so that all the world might behold 
them gratis. To be receuilli in the presence of a Eubens 
seems to me to indicate the real devotional tempera- 
ment. The crowd, the Ptubenses, the atmosphere, and 
the presence of some hundred or so of dear fellow- 
tourists was rather hostile to tranquil appreciation, so 
that at first I saw little in the cathedral of Antwerp 
17* 



i 



394 TKANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

to justify its great reputation. But I came back in the 
late afternoon, at that time which a wise man will 
always choose for visiting (finally at least) a great 
church — the half-hour before it closes. The Eubenses, 
those monstrous flowers of art, had folded their gor- 
geous petals ; but this I did not regret, as I had been 
in the interval to the Museum, where there are a dozen 
more, and I had drifted to a conclusion. The church 
was empty, or filled only with the faded light and its 
own immense solemnity. It is very magnificent ; not 
duskily nor mysteriously so, but with a vast, simple 
harmony which, like all great things, grows and grows 
as you observe it. Its length is extraordinary, and it 
has the peculiarity, unique in my observation, of pos- 
sessing no less than six aisles, besides the nave. Its 
height is in harmony with these splendid proportions, 
and it gave me altogether (I do not know the literal 
measurements) an almost unequalled impression of 
vastness. Externally, its great tower, of the most florid 
and flamboyant, the most embroidered and perforated 
Gothic, is one of the few worthy rivals of the peerless 
steeple of Strasburg. 

The Antwerp Museum is very handsomely housed, 
and has an air of opulence very striking after the 
meagre and dusky contrivances in this line of thrifty 
Holland. But there is logic in both cases. You bend 
your nose over a Gerard Dow and use a magnifying 
glass ; whereas, the least that can be done by the pro- 
tectors of Eubens's glory is to give you a room in which 
you can stand twenty yards from the canvas. I may 
say directly that even at twenty yards Eubens gave 



IN BELGIUM. 395 

me less pleasure than I had hoped. I say hoped rather 
than expected, for I was already sufficiently familiar 
with him to have felt the tendency of my impressions, 
and yet I had fancied that in the atmosphere in which 
he wrought, in the city of which he is the genius loci, 
they might be diverted into the channel of sympathy. 
But they followed their own course, and I can express 
them only by saying that the painter does not please 
me. If Eubens does not 'phase you, what is left ? — 
for I find myself utterly unable to perceive in him a 
trace of that intellectual impressiveness claimed by 
some of his admirers. I read awhile since a charming 
book in which an acute French critic, M. Emile Mon- 
tegut, records his impressions of Belgium and Holland, 
and this work was partly responsible for my supposi- 
tion that I should find more in the author of the 
" Descent from the Cross " collectively, at Antwerp, 
than I had found in him, individually, at London, Paris, 
and Florence. M. Montegut, I say, is acute, and the 
number of things his acuteness finds in Eubens it 
would take up all my space to recount. According to 
him, Eubens was not only one of the greatest of mere 
painters, but he was the greatest genius who ever 
thought, brush in hand. The answer to this seems 
simple : Eubens, to my sense, absolutely did not think. 
He not only did not think greatly, but he did not think 
at all. M. Montegut declares that he was a great 
dramatist superadded to a great painter, and calls upon 
the people of Antwerp to erect to him in the market- 
place a colossal monument (the one already standing 
there will do, it seems to me) and inscribe upon the 



396 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

pedestal liis title to the glory of having carried his art 
beyond its traditional limits, and produced effects gen- 
erally achieved only by the highest dramatic poetry. 
If the great painter of rosy brawn had had half his 
commentator's finesse^ he would have been richly en- 
dowed. M. Montegut finds, among other things, un- 
utterable meanings in the countenance of the Abys- 
sinian king who is looking askance at the Virgin in 
the " Adoration " of the Antwerp Museum. I remem- 
bered them so well that, in leaving the cathedral, I 
hurried to commune with this masterpiece of expres- 
siveness. I recommend him to the reader who may 
next pass that way. Let him tell me, from an unbiassed 
mind, how many supplementary emotions he finds 
reflected in the broad concupiscence of the monarch's 
black visage. I was disappointed ; dramatists of the 
first order are rare, and here was one the less. If 
Eubens is anywhere dramatic, in the finer sense of the 
term, it is in his masterpiece, the " Descent from the 
Cross/' of the cathedral ; of all his pictures, this one 
comes the nearest to being impressive. It is superbly 
painted, and on the whole very noble ; but it is only 
a happier specimen of the artist's habitual manner — 
painting by improvisation, not by reflection. Besides 
the Eubenses at Antwerp, I have seen several others. 
Those at Brussels, unfortunately, with most of their 
companions of the Flemish school, have been now some 
two years invisible. They are being restored ; but one 
is curious to see the effect of two years' refreshment 
upon the native robustness of most Eubenses. I need 
not speak of these various productions in detail ; some 



IN BELGIUM. 



397 



are better, some are worse, all are powerful, and all, 
on the whole, are irritating. They all tell the same 
story— that the artist had in a magnificent degree 
the painter's temperament, without having in anything 
like a proportionate degree the painter's mind. When 
one therefore, says that he was perfectly superficial, 
one indicates a more fatal fault than in applying the 
same term to many a more delicate genius. What 
makes Eubens irritating is the fact that he always 
might have been more interesting. Half the conditions 
are there — vigor, facility, color, the prodigious impulse 
of genius. Nature has given them all, and he holds 
the'^other half in his own hands. But just when the 
others should appear and give the picture that stamp 
which draws from us, over and above our relish of the 
natural gift, a certain fine sympathy with the direction 
it takes, Eubens uncloses his careless grasp, and drops 
them utterly out of sight. He never approaches some- 
thing really fine but to miss it ; he never attempts a 
really interesting effect but to vulgarize it. Our deep- 
est interest, as to an artist, depends on the way he 
deliberates and chooses. Everything up to that point 
may be superb, but we care for him with a certain 
affection only when we feel him responsibly selecting 
among a number of possibiHties. This sensible, intel- 
lectual pulsation often gives a charm to the works of 
painters to whom nature has been anything but lib- 
eral, and the great limitation of Rubens is that in him 
one' never perceives it. He takes what comes, and 
if it happens to be really pictorial, he has a singular 
faculty of suggesting that there is no merit in his 



398 TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

having taken it. He never waits to choose ; he never 
pauses to deliberate; and one may say, vulgarly, he 
throws away his oranges when he has given them but 
a single squeeze. The foolish fellow does not know 
how sweet they are ! One ends, in a manner, by dis- 
liking his real gifts. A little less facility, we call out, 
a shade or so less color, a figure or so the fewer tossed 
in, a bosom or two less glowingly touched ; only some- 
thing once in a while to arrest us with the thought 
that it has arrested you! 

Almost as noteworthy as anything else in the Ant- 
werp Museum is the title of a picture by Titian, of 
average Titianesque merit. It is worth transcribing 
for its bizarre conflict of suggestions : " John, Bastard 
of Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, husband, by her first mar- 
riage, of Lucretia Borgia, and then Bishop of Paphos 
and Admiral of the Pontifical Galleys, is presented 
to St. Peter by the Pope Alexander YI." Add to this 
that St. Peter is seated upon a fragment of antique 
sculpture, surrounded by a frieze representing a pagan 
sacrifice ! Even that harshly sincere genius, Quentin 
Matsys, who shines hard by in a brilliantly pure piece 
of coloring, can hardly persuade us that we are in sim- 
ple Flanders, and not in complex Italy. 

It often happens in travelling that places turn out to 
be less curious that we had supposed, but it is a com- 
paratively rare fortune to find them more so. And yet 
this was my luck with Brussels, a city of which my 
imagination had made so light that it hung by a hair 
whether I should go there or not. It is generally 
spoken of by its admirers as a miniature Paris, and I 



IN BELGIUM. 



399 



always viewed it with that contempt with which a 
properly regulated mind regards those shabby, pirated 
editions of the successful French books of the day 
which are put forth in Belgium. These iH-conditioned 
little volumes are miniature Victor Hugos and Miche- 
lets. But Brussels should ask to be delivered from 
its friends. It is not a miniature anything, but a very 
solid and extensive old city, with a physiognomy and 
character quite its own. It is very much less elegant 
than the Paris of the last twenty years ; but it is 
decidedly more picturesque. Paris has nothing to 
compare for quaintness of interest with the Brussels 
Hotel de Yille, and the queer old carved and many- 
windowed houses which surround the square. The 
Hotel de Ville is magnificent, and its beautiful Gothic 
belfry gives, in quite another line, an equal companion 
in one's memory to the soaring campanile of the palace 
of the Signoria at Florence. Few cities have a cathe- 
dral in so impressive a position as St. Gudule — on a 
steep hill-top, with a long flight of steps at the base of 
its towers ; and few cities, either, have so charming a 
public garden as the Pare. There is something pecul- 
iarly picturesque in that high-in-the-air look of the 
Pare as you glance from end to end of its long alleys, 
and see the sky beneath the arch of the immense trees 
meeting the bend of the path. AU this part of Brus- 
sels, and the wide, windy Place Eoyale, handsome as 
the 'handsome was understood fifty years ago, has an 
extreme brightness and gayety of aspect which is yet 
quite distinct from the made-to-order brilliancy of the 
finest parts of renovated Paris. The Brussels Museum 



400 TEANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. 

of pictures is admirably arranged ; but, unfortunately, 
as I have said, only half of it is now accessible. This, 
however, contains some gems of the Dutch school — 
among them a picture by Steen, representing a lad 
coming into a room to present a fish to a ruddy vi- 
rago who sits leering at him. The young man, for 
reasons best known to himself, is sticking out his 
tongue, and these reasons, according to M. Montegut, 
are so numerous and recondite that I should like the 
downright old caricaturist himself to have heard a few 
of them. I wonder where his tongue would have 
gone. 

Ghent I found to be an enormous, empty city, with 
an old Flemish gable-end peeping here and there from 
its rows of dull, white houses, and various tall and 
battered old church-towers looking down over deserted, 
sunny squares. In the middle of all this, in the stately 
church of St. Bavon, is the great local treasure, the 
" Adoration of the Lamb," by the brothers Van Eyck. 
This is not only one of the pictures of Ghent, but one 
of the pictures of the world. It represents a large 
daisied meadow shut in with a great flowering tangle 
of hedges, out of which emerge various saints of either 
sex, carrying crowns and palms. In front are two 
other groups of apostles and prophets, all kneeling 
and worshipping. In the centre is an altar, sur- 
mounted with the fleecy symbol of the Word, and sur- 
rounded with a ring of adoring angels. Behind is a 
high horizon of blue mountains, and the silhouettes of 
three separate fantastic cities, all apparently composed 
of church-towers. The picture is too perfect for praise ; 



C'^ rD-79. 



IN BELGIUM. 401 

the coloring seems not only not to have lost, but actu- 
ally to have been intensified and purified, by time. 
One may say the same of the precious Memlings at 
Bruges — and this is all I can say of that drowsy little 
city of grassy streets and colossal belfries and sluggish 
canals and mediseval memories. 



THE END. 






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